Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Today our daughter will have been gone one year. There is a whole in the universe but not entirely, as long as we who love her keep her memory alive and her writings remain available. She sent out her voice and it was heard. Our granddaughter is energizing our memorial to her mother, set for the fall. She is a tiger, like her mom. And, stunningly, as she has become a teenager, she looks more and more like her mother. Yesterday I spent time searching for old photos of my daughter on IPhoto. She was so beautiful, with a smile that glowed. Then I looked at photos of myself at my granddaughter's age, sent years ago by my childhood friend. I was thinking of my granddaughter, daughter and myself at 13. It's a complex, difficult age, and my daughter's father died when she was that age, and I had to move across country to begin a high school where I knew no one, and now my granddaughter enters her second year without her mother. I'm thinking about how those events shaped us, and how, for me, it took many years to fully face the loss, my mother's cancer, and how much my subsequent actions were a response. We handle what we can handle when we can.