Reflection

Wow! It's been awhile since I've posted anything and I need to catch up. When I last wrote my daughter had just left to begin her junior year in college and now that year is over! The puppy is a year old and I seriously think she is afflicted with some kind of hyperactivity disorder. On the other hand I may just be too old and cranky for puppy-rearing.
Sooo much has happened over the past year that it's hard to know where to begin, but begin I shall. Fall of 2010 went by pretty uneventfully, with a pleasant Thanksgiving and family and friends to celebrate the holidays with. The new year however brought with it a tidal wave of change and upheaval, and a truckload of sorrow to go with it.
On the morning of January 1st, 2011 I got a phone call informing me that my nephew (who was also my godson) had been stabbed several times and was airlifted to a hospital 50 miles away. Doctors there had performed emergency surgery and he was probably going to be okay they said. He did survive the assault and I brought him home with me when he was released from the hospital to recover, along with his 3 year old son.
My nephew's mother and I have been dear friends for 35 years so when she flew up from Florida, she stayed with me too. We hadn't seen each other for some years, partly because of the distance between us, and partly because we've been guilty of that "there's always next year" mentality. My beloved nephew Ben ended that black hole of time that had separated his mother and I for so long. And I will forever be grateful for that.
Before my friend left to go home that week we agreed that we would never let that much time go by without getting together again. By early March I had booked a flight to Florida to visit her. I flew in on a Saturday morning and we made all kinds of plans for how we would spend the week together. We had a wonderful dinner cooked over an open fire and afterward we sat around to relax and visit.
Later that night our plans, and our lives changed in a way we never could have imagined. My dear friend got a phone call and the next thing I knew, we were on the floor as she began to utter cries and groans, the likes of which only a mother who has lost a child could even begin to understand. Her eldest child, Ben, had died that night of a drug overdose. And I was there. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen or felt.
I still miss the way he looked at me, he could see into your soul, and he trusted me. He trusted people, but most of all he loved people. He had a wonderful sense of humor, and I miss that too. I talk to his mother on the phone almost daily now.