9:01 a.m. - Tuesday, Aug. 05, 2014
Mary
A million things happen and it results in this. If a million other things happened, it would be different, but here I am, thinking this, believing that at this precise moment and sometimes wonder how it all got to this. Of course, thinking won't reveal the mystery, thinking being based on the dead past. Memory is at very best, partial, often confabulated, sometimes totally made up though our mind may believe otherwise. Memory is not a video recorder replaying the past. We meet someone and form an image and in each successive meeting the image is constantly amended. After awhile, we can no longer re-member the original, years intervened, all that comes up is the gradually changed image that now arises. Time intervenes, memory is veiled at best. Incidents where high emotion is present, linger longer not untainted.
I wrote this down today because Mary died last Friday. She took her last breath after 83 years. Memories come pouring out, partial memories, now alive with an instantaneous missing her. Death, so final. Another of my friends, loved ones, gone. It seems so strange that I will never see her again though, in truth, I never saw her often, just now and then over a long number of years. She is embedded in my memory, most of it true but hardly complete.
Distance, circumstance and migraines keep me from attending the funeral tomorrow almost 4 yrs to the day since the burial of Dan. She will be encrusted with stories and although the stories will be subject to the function of memory, the love will be 100%. The love will be as much for family and friends as it will be for Mary for it will be shared, round and round and even I some 16 or 1700 miles away will feel it. Mary touched us, some a little, some with abundance. We carry her with us now like mist, not totally clear.

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