Remembering

For most people, tonight is a night for costumes and candy, bobbing and begging, tricks and treats.  For me, however, this night, Samhain, represents a time to reflect and remember those who have gone before us, honoring the souls of the loved ones who now reside in the spirit realm. This year has been especially raw because just yesterday, my deceased mother's birthday, I had to put down my sweet red Dobe Baron who suffered from lymphoma and heart disease, not quite a year after we gave this last gift to his Dobe brother Titan. And, my step-father now enters his fourth week in the hospital, steadily deteriorating from advanced cases of cirrhosis and COPD and not realizing that he will never, ever go home again. 

Tonight, as I do each October 31, I lit a candle in my front window to guide those departed spirits should they want to lift the veil between the worlds and make their presence known.  Tonight, I will say prayers of blessing for the loved ones who have gone to spirit before me and will greet me when I arrive. Tonight, I will pay close attention to my dreams.

I will look for the grandfathers who died the year I was born, and the grandmother I barely knew whose death from colon cancer didn't come to light until a random phone call from a cousin two years later.  I will look for  the grandmother who raised me and had a stroke when I was 11 followed by seven years in a nursing home bed where gangrene finally took her life.  I will look for my father, the parent I found and lost and found again, who waited for me to get to New York before falling into a coma and dying from AIDS in 1988 at the beginning of the epidemic. I will look for my father-in-law who never came off of the ventilator after surgery in 1998 for an aortic aneurysm and in whose hospital room I spent four months writing my dissertation before he finally decided to have his ventilator removed and let us send him on.  I will look for my mother who died two weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2006, and I will let her know how it haunts me to this day that I had to be the one to take her off of life support.  I will look for Adam who took his life the night before my birthday in 2008 and whose absence is at the edge of my awareness every single day, and most especially on those days I spend with our Hayli who still talks about the daddy she lost when she was two.  I will look for my mother-in-law whose fierce independence was ripped away by the stroke from which she never recovered, and I'll let her know that I wished I could have ended suffering when she begged me to do so.  And finally, I will look for every animals I have loved and lost whose shadows I sometimes still see and whose weight at the foot of the bed I still feel some nights. 

Tonight I will let the tears fall, take time for silence, and most of all...remember.