On February One he sent

an e-mail to his two children

by his late wife who died

over twenty years before

at the young and tender age

of forty-nine, at least it seems

young and tender and so

God awful premature. He didn’t

write it because he thought

they needed reminding so

much as to let them know

that he hadn’t forgotten and

to connect in that commonly

shared place of pain, sorrow,

love, memories and 

ache at the absence of 

a presence, “Today would

have been your mother’s

seventieth birthday.”  What

he didn’t write is what he

thought and he thought,

she would have been just

as pretty as ever. They

knew that. No sense writ-

ing the obvious, he thought.