We are born a story waiting to be written, a blank page waiting to be inscribed.
When we come into this life, we are looking forward always, beginning as we crawl toward and then walk away from our parents. Our first drivers licenses, our first cars, our first drinks, our first crushes, our first girlfriends.
Then we fall in love and marry, have our own children and our pets and then our divorces and the sadness that they bring.
As we go though the stages of life, from child to adult, to midlife, to old age, we learn the lessons of sorrow as we look back at those we lost along the way: parents and friends, brothers and sisters, wives or husbands, and even the pets we lost and the enjoyment they brought—but for only a season, then they too were gone.
We remember!
From these stages, we go through a transition, from looking forward to looking back.
Each stage must have a purpose, or life itself is an invented story, a hologram in which roles are acted out. Each lesson—like life itself—must have a reason.
We learn to say goodbye!
Somewhere there is a snickering at the frailty of us. We are driven by our own emotions, and from them the grief life provides in abundance.
We love and lose. We find love again but are so hardened by our experiences we are afraid to share ourselves, so we retreat.
Sometimes we fail to see that which is right in front of us. We fail to say the words they long to hear. Out of fear!
Then there will come a time when they say goodbye to us. And the cycle begins again.
A never-ending chain of life, the players may be different, but the story is old, originating with time itself.
Then what?
