Over the weekend, I attended a family reunion.  We gathered, my siblings and I, along with our children (and two girlfriends), plus an aunt or two, to commune, remember, and celebrate.  Hanging over us, and if you read my entry on July 4, you already know, was the thought of our wonderful and recently departed mother, who has now been gone three years.
     To remember Mom, we placed a photo of her on the fireplace mantle and lit a couple of candles.  We also set a framed poem that we all feel aptly expresses her and her impact on our lives, along with a note that a tree has been planted in her honor in a Glacier National Park in Montana.  We did not want Mom to be forgotten.
     Aside from the girlfriends, everyone at the reunion has many memories of Mom.  If the children marry and have children, however, their offspring will have no physical memory of her, only stories and photographs.  They will not remember Mom in the way she is being remembered today.  Life will continue on without her.
     On the other hand, we, my siblings and I, can rejoice.  We can rejoice in God's goodness in giving her to us as our mother; we can rejoice that this goodness touched our children; we can rejoice that even in a thoroughly fractured world, we experienced, through Mom, nearly ninety years of wonderful blessings from God.  We have so much for which to be thankful, so much with which we can keep going, so much out of which to sustain and contribute to the wonder and health of the world.
     Most of all, I guess, we can rejoice that buried deep in the universe is the idea of love, that out of everything that God could have been, he is first and foremost love, and that out of this love we gave us life, life with our mother.  Love is not random.  It's always a gift.