Valentine's Day

Valentine's day, is, for me, an incredibly difficult day.
It is a day that we should be happy and full of love, a day of romance.
There are those sentiments for me.  I have been blessed with a love of a lifetime.
And from that love, three children who have made my life complete .
I have friends of whose love I am certain beyond all measure.
But in the midst of this, there is a void;
a chasm so deep and so wide, so heart-wrenching of such magnitude
as to sometimes stop me in my tracks.

On Valentine's day, in 1965,  I was joined on my life's journey by a little girl.
The ultimate Valentine...A baby sister, all blonde and sweet... soft and silky... and mine.

And as can happen, life turned strange...
the two of us were set adrift in the world two years later... alone.

How this could happen, was then, and remains, one of life's mysteries.
The details are not important.

We had each other.

We were taken into the bosom of the old folks, where we grew and we thrived.
We had each other.  In every sense of the words, I was hers and she was mine.
I was responsible for her.  In a legal sense, we belonged to noone, except the other.
There is significant fear in the depth of that obligation when you are seven.
We grew.  We were loved.  We were given a sense of time and place.
We were educated. We laughed and played and cried together.
I taught her to ride a bike, to play paper dolls, to read.
We played in the woods and wandered and swam in the river.
We climbed trees and lay in the tall pasture grass and watched the night skies.
We sang and flew kites and painted our nails.
We were sisters.

Then, one night, she died.  The details of the night haunted me for years.
The hindsight, the retrospective thinking, the wondering why we did not see the symptoms of a brain tumor...
When morning came, I was alone.
She was gone.

Time does change the memories, but it never takes it away.
18 years do not disappear.  The love you shared does not evaporate.

As you go on, and you do go on...
you remember the good things... you realize that you carry her with you...
and on Valentine's day, you are grateful, even though you are sad.

In memory of Robin Elizabeth Watson    *February 14, 1965 - July 23, 1983