Life Celebrations

In 2002, I met Sherry who has become a very good friend of mine.  She and her husband showed up at a garage sale at our home.  They had recently lost their son and I had sent a casserole through mutual friends for the family gathering.  They came to the garage sale to thank me for the casserole and condolences we had extended to them.  Dwight was inside having donuts and coffee with some good friends from church who were soon to relocate to Washington, D.C.  I stuck my head inside to tell Dwight of our “new friends’ that had come to the garage sale.  Mike and Charlotte offered to watch the garage sale so that our “new friends” could join us for coffee and donuts.     

We visited with our grieving friends and extended a dinner invitation for that evening.  That day our new friendship was born.  Over these 13 years, we have shared lots of fun as well as heartbreaks.  Sherry’s husband also worked at the City of Wylie and some years ago was very much a casualty of management like so many others that were set-up through no wrong of their own, but for the City of Wylie’s management team’s own purposes.  As with so many of these former employees, we did not find out “the rest of the story” of his circumstances until after Dwight’s debacle happened. 

About five years ago, Sherry and I discovered we had something very much in common and most unusual.  Her mother had passed away and she was sharing some things that had happened at the family visitation and the funeral.  She told me that one of her small granddaughters had written a note of her feelings of the loss for her great-grandmother.  She had written “You will be mist”….an endearing note from a young child made even more special at the misspelling of ‘missed’.  Sherry said that the day of the funeral as they were at the graveside, a fine mist enveloped them and there was a feeling as if her mother indeed was all around them in the mist.  She had brought a memorial bulletin and we had already discovered that the family visitation was held at the same funeral home in Rockwall where we had Daddy’s visitation in 1997.

Some time later as I was reading the memorial bulletin, I discovered our most unusual commonality that we shared.  Sherry’s mother and my dad not only shared the same date of death, but they also shared the same birth date, each some years apart.  So each year, I not only think of Daddy on those dates, I also think of Sherry and her mom.  We have celebrated our parents and their birthdays over lunch together when our calendars fall in sync on January 26^th.  We choose to celebrate the day with joy and thankfulness and today, I shall celebrate what would be Daddy’s 90^th birthday and count my many blessings.  Thank you, Lord!

Eccl. 7:1  A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of one’s birth  NKJV