*The note is on lovely card stock, orange flowered lanterns in a yellow sky, blue-feathered birds in a flock on the line.  And from the lanterns, metallic tassels glint their hot and and shiny copper accent, all of it looking bountiful, rich and pleasant.  I wrote this for my mother in 2014 as she was 'continuing' to The Great Beyond in 2015.

Could it be taken, this note, to be a sting of somehow making 'cherish' the sum, applied to moments shared in 'the wincing way it is?' 'in the sad way I've become?'  Or might it be heard, this message and its 'cherish' word, as nothing awful seen, but something full of grace and the painful keen opportunity to know what being 'alive' in this world can really mean?  Living=dying.  They are twins, you see, twins face to face, laughing and crying simultaneously, and neither being right nor wrong.

The twins together sing their song in sharps and flats that switch around and knock us back with beauty and with chaos.  We think that dying is the loss and living the gain, but maybe it is just the opposite, once we go back from where we came.

Cherish every moment left with me, here in my infirmity, as witness in the jury box, hearing, seeing, feeling lots that proves you have a heart, a soul, a healthy mind that does know what I have steadily let go.

The card in all its prettiness spells 'cherish' with a capital C, and points to what can not be seen beyond my dissolving flesh and bone, but felt - like copper tassels burning - as not dissolving, but returning.

~~ djl