How Time Flies By

       Daniel,

              This next week it will be Thanksgiving, and of course the day after will be "Black Friday", the perennial awful day when in just seconds, you left the Earth.  I don't mean it to sound quite so dramatic, but I suppose the loss of a child is something with which we never quite come to terms, while we ourselves still occupy the Earth.   You would be proud of your siblings.  They have each carved a path and they move along as best they can.  Please know that you are missed, not only each day, but on those special holidays and on the anniversaries of your birth and of your departure.

               This week there has been a lot of evidence of the passing of time.  I gained some weight after your passing. For a time I seemed to think that I could eat your share for you, until you returned, and of course, it doesn't work that way.  I have now lost all of that weight and I have the energy I had in my thirties.  The rest of the world has not fared so well.  Some dear friends of ours, I know you know who I mean, were in an accident, and are having a hard time. Their children are grown and gone, and are far away, with the holidays coming soon.  This week, I reacquainted with a friend I had twenty-five years ago.  I remember well when she was expecting her daughter.  I learned this week that her daughter is 25, a working adult, and is living in Northern Virginia. I am still finding people who knew our family long ago, and although they knew about you, they did not know of your passing.

              This Autumn is different from the one in which you departed.  That Autumn, the progression of the leaves was slower. It was warmer. This year, all the leaves are completely gone, and we have had three hard freezes already.  This morning was foggy. I can feel Winter looming as if behind a curtain.  Sometimes I wonder if during Fall, you could somehow must jump from one plane to another, and spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with us. It's crazy, I know, but sometimes, the unreality of what happened that day, your passing with no clear explanation, and then layered conjecture after the autopsies, makes me wonder if with such a bizarre happening, if we could be visited somehow with bizarre luck and some type of a brilliant resolution.  I know intellectually that you are no longer here, but my heart is still ready for you to come home, as if you are at a heavenly university of some kind.

               I remember you, at 12 1/2 as if I saw you yesterday, although I know your soul soared and you grew when you left this plane, and went on to Heaven.  I try hard to imagine who you have become.  You would be seventeen now, had you remained on the Earth. Please know that you remain one of my life's greatest joys, even if you combine your time here with the inexplicably day in which we lost you. I wouldn't trade one single minute with you here.  I do have regrets.  I still wonder sometimes if I had somehow supernaturally known what was about to happen, if I could have taken you to a bright physician at University of Virginia, and simply made something up so that he could have looked you over with a fine tooth comb, and somehow have interrupted the process which was about to occur.  Of course, in my less tortured moments I realize that you were called by God, and that no amount of intervention or interference really can change the will of God, if it is his intent to call you home.

              Please know I love you very much, and I hear your echoes here in the house. I know that you and my Dad are together and this comforts me.  Please give him my love also.  You know you have my respect, my love, and are always in my thoughts particularly during the holiday season.

               I love you both so much.....

Lara Fabian "For Always"