17 years and counting...

Today is my dad's 17th death anniversary.

We planned the visit a week ago, and it couldn't have fallen on a more beautiful, sunny day than this.

It was a real trip down memory lane, and mum commented on how truly terrifying this day was, all of 17 years ago - and how the weather was so radically different.

I was transported back to that moment, not unlike in Harry Potter world when a magician touches a Portkey - and what came back to me was hysterical crying, thunder, lightning and rain and the sinking feeling of watching my dad's coffin being released lower and lower into the ground. Mum was beside herself on that day (to say the least), but the person I remember crying the hardest was my youngest auntie on my dad's side. A family I have never known since them, and only have half-truths about. She didn't deserve to cry as much as my mum had a right to.

And then on the same spot, I stand once again 17 years later.

The sky is a gorgeous blue, the clouds above us are moving steadily along, building upwards like cheery cotton candy. The trees sing their own song to the tune of the light wind. It couldn't have been a better day.

I guess it's a bit morbid to dwell on it, but it struck me how time, truly, heals all wounds.

A blink of an eye, almost two decades. My mum is starting to grow lots of grey hair. In that time, we've all grown up. She's married someone else, had another kid. Living and leading a different life now.

What would it have been like if my dad was still alive?

I remember him, and yet I don't. It comes back to me sometimes, sometimes it doesn't. There has been this gaping hole all my life that's never been filled and I will never know what person I will be like had it been filled. I think about all theories and some sociologist in the past somewhere will probably tell you how the lack of a male figure in my life has moulded the conditions on which I choose my own partner.

Whatever, really.

I was truly shocked when I first noticed how much mum's aged. She still does look youthful, but my she's never had that much grey hair before. Age is a scary thing. And time. And she said today, in another blink of an eye, it will once again be another decade. And then another. The only constant is time. How unfettered it is by the passing by of all humans on earth. In our short little life.

I suddenly felt like there were countless things I had to do. And too little time to do them. At the prime of my youth, the sense of urgency to leave an indelible mark on our falliable earth never kicked in as strongly as today.

I can't let another 17 years fly by. The last 17 had been great - had its ups and downs. But the next 17 will be better. Has to be better. No?

I feel my age even more pronounced when I look at my siblings and thought to myself, what I was thinking when I was them?

It was the invincibility of youth, the stuff of dreams, the ambition to conquer.

The murkiness of it all. Doesn't crystallize. When we grow older.

I am convinced I have to write more, however. I owe it to myself.

I started revisiting old blogs, old posts. There is no better memory than words on a page.

And something surfaces... A quote I wrote a few years ago, and will one day I hope re-appear in my book:

It is the curse of the intelligent for their capacity to remember. The stupid are happy only because they lack the facility of memory.