I had the luxury of speaking with the great Margaret Anna Alice yesterday evening. After being awake for over 24 hours she had just learned that her mom is quite ill. They have some difficult and dangerous choices to make. She is devastated. Hat in hand, I ask for yet another prayer: please pray for them both.

All of this sadness that surrounds us in this dwindling age got me thinking about love and death and life. Here is an arrangement of quotes as a thank you for your blessings and grace:

—

Once there was a boy who gave a girl twelve roses. Eleven of them were real, one was plastic. Then he told her he will love her until the last one dies.

It was a promise he never took back.

But then one horrible day she died instead, and as her absence filled his world, he begged:

If tears could build a stairway,

and memories a lane,

I'd march right up to heaven

and bring you home again.

But no matter the depth of his grief, no such stairway ever appeared. As the years trickled by ever so painfully, on occasion he would wake up feeling fine. Then he’d remember.

As the breaking wheel of time turned and his youth and hope fled him he went to her garden:

An old man kneeling all alone

Plants a plastic rose in a garden of stone

For seventy years now she's been gone

But his devotion is still going strong

She looked down and her heart was lost. She whispered:

Do not stand at my grave and weep;


I am not there. I do not sleep.


I am a thousand winds that blow

.
I am diamond glints on snow.


I am sunlight on ripened grain.


I am the gentle autumn rain.


When you awake and greet the dawn
I am the day as it is born


I am birds in circling flight


I am the soft starlight at night

Do not stand at my grave and cry;


I am not there. 



I did not die.

He looked up with a lighter heart and sighed, “thank you”. After seventy years his loneliness finally fled him. He was no longer kneeling all alone. Her presence filled his world.

He retrieved her rose.

—-

Yesterday, after only few brief paragraphs of explanation of what she just found out her mother was facing, an exhausted and grief-stricken Ms. Alice then apologized for “unloading her problems on me”. Can you imagine? Please pray for Ms. Alice. She fights for us, let us fight for her.