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Kathy's rose petals going over Glen Falls 10/29/10

A year ago, I wrote this.  I remember writing it and it seems like the words would put out there into the world only last week.  Time and the passing of it does funny things.  It likes to speed up at will and then come to an earth halting stop.

I think about Patrick every single day of my life.  Sometimes I spend more time remembering and trying to pin point moments in my brain than I probably should.  I get angry.  I get really mad at all the things he never got to do.  That he never got married, had a child of his own or even spent a good long time at peace.  Patrick was a lot of things and one part of him never seemed able to slow down.  That's good sometimes, but everyone deserves a few years of just living a quiet life, of just being in the world and taking what comes in stride.  Patrick had a fighter's spirit and I think he got confused sometimes at who it was or what it was he should be fighting against.

I was thinking about this yesterday on my drive home from work.  I was trying imagine where he was now, whether he was simply being and at peace.  Or maybe he was watching over us.  Or perhaps he'd been born again.  The selfish part of me wants to imagine him in the great beyond, waiting for us.  Paving our paths and keeping us from harm.

Another part of me wants to believe that he has been given another life, is born again and this time lessons from his other life will stay with him.  In a silent, unwavering strength that he won't likely question or know how it got there.  I like to imagine him growing old in another part of the world, in another time.  I want to believe that he'll get to grow old, have grandchildren.  I like to see him having a moment of deja vu as he runs down a trail through the forest.  A moment that tells him he'd done this before somehow.  That he has an older sister who teases him relentlessly but this time he knows that she is only doing it out of love.

I want to see him smile as the sun sets and he slips his hand into his wife's warm fingers.  That they will embrace and he'll know for just a moment that in another time, and in a world a lifetime away, this too should have happened.