Gonna be a busy, emotional, weekend.

• Forever 52. If you were to ask my how old my mom is, I'd answer 52.  This is completely wrong.  She's actually 57.  She turned 57 months ago. But my father died almost 6 years ago and he had just turned 52.  In my mind no one can ever be older than he was when he died.  It means that life has moved on. That time has continued to flow past me.  They say time heals all wounds, this is a lie, the truth is we just use to our circumstances. We learn to live around our grief.  The wound is still there, it still hurts, we just get used to the pain.  Tomorrow, Dec. 16th,  would have been my father's 58th birthday.  I can only imagine what it would have been like to have him with us these last few years. 

• Saturday my siblings and I will congregate at my mother's house to celebrate Christmas with the extended family, but afterward we will be having what we affectionately call "The Last Supper."  Just weeks before dad lost his fight with cancer, we celebrated Christmas with him.  He was in surprising good spirits, that may have been due to the amount of morphine he was on or the universe knew that we were losing him soon so let us have this one day of laughter.  Whatever the reason he was cheerful.  I can clearly see him sitting in the kitchen mashing potatoes.  We ate a good southern meal of liver, fried okra, mashed potatoes and biscuits.  There were fried pork chops available for the weirdos of the group who didn't eat liver.  We laughed and told stories and cooked.  It was a great day.  This Saturday there will be laughter and stories, but there will be a level of sadness.  We will all be remembering that something very important is missing from our lives. 
  

• And then there is Sunday! This Sunday will be our 12th wedding anniversary.  We don't have money to do anything special this year - who am I kidding, it's a week before Christmas so we NEVER have money to celebrate our anniversary.  But that's never been an issue for us, we usually like to just spend the day with each other.  We're both very low maintenance so we don't ever expect gifts.  We'll probably sit around being amazed that 12 years have past and we're still completely in love with each other.
  

Enjoy your weekend!