Thank you so much.

[Journeyman]

2. My condolences on your loss . . .

for losing a Mother is perhaps hardest of all, absent the loss of a spouse.

I find myself at an age where I’ve begun to bury many family and friends. And whether it be age or debility, the culling of remembrances can be sparse at times, and sadly, I know finding those memories may become ever more difficult. Faces and voices fade, memory clouds over. So I find it useful to recall that the departed are best remembered if thought of in a context. In other words, think not of them but of specific incidents and occasions you shared with them, and in the memory of those seemingly mundane acts the life and love of those absent and missed will spring to your mind unbidden and remain with you untarnished by time’s passing.

For time will pass. It is our great salve, our constant comfort. And though it seems, in the presence of death, that night enfolds our lives, it is well to remember the poet Tagore, who observed that death does not extinguish the light; it only puts out the lamp because the dawn has come.

In this light of your new day, remembrances of past wonders meld into reflections of the inevitable. But it needn’t be a time for sorrow. We can take heart and find the strength to persevere, for a great truth of our lives is the enduring quality of love. Distance can not diminish it, nor death defeat it. And in the face of every loss, there remains the comfort that if there is any substitute for love, it is memory.