As most people do now, I was checking my email and browsing through my Facebook page to while the time when the funeral march started before the Mass. I looked up and saw my friend Judy whose husband was being buried, asking me if Bob my husband made it to the Mass to sing the songs they requested the day before at the funeral home and I said yes.
Just a few minutes later my husband's voice singing the song Amazing Grace filled the church and I saw my friend Judy leaning on her son Joey's shoulder overcome by emotion. It was a sad touching scene and I was teary eyed.
At this point flashbacks of our days in the Mothers Group which both Judy and I were members of in the early nineties came back. Both our kids, Joey and Bettina, were not yet ready for kindergarten and they were babysat while the Mothers Group members got together with Sr. Ursula for some discussion of the topic of the day. It felt surreal being brought back to those days like watching a movie. I felt the nostalgia gripping me and amazed how time flew with our kids now in their thirties.
The same nostalgic feeling engulfed me when I heard the news that my classmate, Manuel, from college in the late sixties passed away unexpectedly in his office at Caltech. I wrote his wife in an email how Manuel has fulfilled most of his dreams at this point of his life. In retrospect, I question myself after writing the email how do I really know what his dreams were. I just remember him as being highly intelligent and just surmised he would fulfill whatever dreams he might have had. I do not even remember what exactly what my dreams were then either. It does not matter. We both had dreams and that was what was important to sustain us to go with the flow in our lives.
The journeys I took back in both instances were cathartic. I am grateful to have gone back in time and saw that those days were happy ones and I am happier now partly because those times made me who I am today.
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