I like this photo of my mom because I have to believe she liked it. It shows her as an adult and in probably the best shape of her life. Her only complaint, I bet, would be that my sister and I are not in it, and so it is not a true representation of her because we were her whole life.
She died on August 12th, 2012, which was two years ago. I remember collapsing to the ground before I even hung up the phone. To the end, to the very moment before I received the call, I believed that I would get to talk to her again; I believed with all my heart and clung desperately and unashamedly to the hope that everything would be all right. So I guess I am really not as smart as you might think.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats
