Yesterday, as my siblings and I reminded each other, marks another year, another year since the passing of our father over thirty years ago.  Despite the span of those decades, we still miss him, and our mother as well.  Time may heal some, yes, but time will never fully overcome the scars its events imprint on our lives.  There are  losses that, try as we might, we cannot completely assuage.  Although we learn to live with them, though we may even come to develop a measure of acceptance about them, we will never totally erase them from our hearts.  For always and forevermore, they are embedded in the innermost patterns of our soul.
     But as one of my uncles said to me as my siblings and I prepared to leave our mother to return to our lives after saying our final good-byes to Dad, "Everyone is going back to their things." Yes, we were.  But we'd never look at them in the same way again.  Nor should we.  We're personal beings who respond to our lives in personal ways.  And our lives continue.
     Yet the universe remains, an inscrutable mystery, heading to its final denouement, its ultimate destiny.  As are we.  And what then?  Almost inevitably, death makes us wonder: what lies on the other side?
     Thanks, God, that there is more.