Haggis is Closed

The Haggis is closed until Saturday. Tomorrow we will be attending services for my friend who passed away this week. It's still difficult to comprehend her loss, to believe it is real. Such a gigantic force of nature in such a petite package. Still, she lives on in very real ways: her family, her friends, the memories we have of her, the lessons we learned from her, all the ways in which we can live our lives to bring honor to her memory.

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails in the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength, and I stand and watch her until at length she is only a ribbon of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, "There! She's gone!" Gone where? Gone from my sight---that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and just as able to bear her load of living freight to the place of destination. Her diminished size is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says, 'There! She's gone!" there are other voices ready to take up the glad shout, "There! She comes!"

And that is dying.