A Blink of the Eye

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The real difficulty of life at almost 50 years old is that weekends are spent at a graduation party for one of your friend's kids...if you're lucky...or at a funeral parlor to say goodbye to someone...if it's a bad weekend.

This particular weekend we ran the gamut.

A party.

A graduation party.

And a wake.

For my cousin, Kathy...who was way too young to head out to the spiritual side.

And what got me about each event was how quickly it all goes.

At the first party there was a lot of booze around.

None of us really picked it up and drank it.

We looked at it and talked about days gone by when we got particularly over-served with one brand or another.

Then we did a single shot of Jamesons, toasting those days past. I kept thinking that ten years ago it was a very different party.

Then it was on to the wake.

As is now the norm there is a television in the back corner and life is captured in a series of moving pictures with a soft song playing. I sat down and watched my cousin's life play out. Kathy stood beside me and we laughed at the shot of my Dad...caught in mid-wave as he entertained a group of people.

Then there was Grandma Fuzzy.

My heart caught a bit when I saw her.

But my cousin Kathy's life went by so quickly...in the photos and for real...there were shots of her as a baby, on a rollar coaster, with her own kids, and as recently as a month ago.

Just zooming by.

The photos and the time just giving us a glimpse and then disappearing. The music playing on.

I got a real headache watching it play.

I thought of my cousins left behind. The pain of losing a sibling. The horror of losing a Mom for Kathy's kids. The devastation of loss.

"It goes quick," one of my cousins said.

She wasn't talking about the video, either.

We left the funeral parlor with the thoughts of the graduation party the next day. A good buddy's kid is done with high school already.

Seems like she was born yesterday.

Blink of an eye.

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