Christmas and New Year's came and went with nothing eventful....at least nothing I can remember six months later. However, only a few days into the new year, Facebook-induced nostalgia kicked in and plans were put in the works to reunite my circle of friends from junior high school. Fate, karma and just plain good luck were all on our side, and arrangements were made for the nine of us to converge in our hometown. Which happened without a hitch. Any bygones were forgotten, or at least set aside, and I think that all of us, or at least most of us, had a great time. I know that personally, I was thrilled to reconnect with so many of these girls, a good chunk of whom I had not seen in about 23 years. I can't even verbalize how excited I am to have a few of them back in my everyday life.
The spring saw me going away for a scrapbooking retreat in Princeton, which was good, because at least I had scrapping material from the reunion! On the work front, springtime brought the finalization of plans to move our office to a HUGE new space. The physical move took place at the end of May, and we've only been in the new space for two weeks, but things have been going less than smoothly. We still don't have any one system fully functional (phones, computers), and as carefully as we pre-planned, attempting to anticipate our needs and potential problems, we're now having problems we never saw coming. All I know is that I have come home from work each day of the past few weeks bone tired. But its all for a greater good.
On the downside, the past few months have brought about a great deal of loss, the last one hitting pretty close to home. A dear friend that I have had for more than ten years lost both of her parents within three months of each other. I thank God every day that she has her own children to think of, because I am not sure there is any other way that she could get out of bed each morning. I wish there were more I could be doing for her, or that anyone could be doing for her, just to ease her grief. Unfortunately, that ease will only come with time.
Our family had a loss of our own last week when my aunt, my dad's oldest sister, passed away. We had actually been expecting this earlier in May, but she rallied and held on for a few extra weeks. She was diagnosed with dementia a couple years ago, and as much as I tried to tell myself that I lost her with that diagnosis, sitting through her funeral service threw all those thoughts out the window. When my uncle told us in May that her time was coming soon, I started to think about my memories of Aunt Phil, of all the things she was around for and a part of. She "took over" as the matriarch of the family after my grandmother died....she always had to know what was going on with everyone, but at least taking over for Grandma gave her an excuse to. My first paying job was wrapping Christmas presents for her because she hated wrapping. I used her car to take my driver's test. She put together a Halloween care package for me one year in college, with candy and mini pumpkins for me and my friends. When everyone else left, when my dad couldn't even handle being there that day, she was the one who stayed at the hospital with me during the last hours of my mother's life, was the only other person in the room with me when Mom took her last breath. As I grew up and got married, and she moved out of state, the connection wasn't as strong as it had been when I was a kid. Part of that is just what happens as you get older, I guess, but it doesn't lessen the loss. I'll miss her. We all will.
(Dad, Aunt Joan & Aunt Phil, 2003)
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