I am thankful for my sisters.
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| My mother and father with my oldest sister. |
At the end of August was the first anniversary of my mother's death. It was also my sister's birthday. My mother died on the same date that she gave birth to her first child many years earlier. That may or may not mean something depending on how you feel about the cosmic connection of things. I feel like it was a coincidence. Maybe.
What I do know is I didn't want my sister's birthday to forever be overshadowed with the sorrowful day of our mother's passing. So I told her to start thinking ahead on how she wanted to celebrate. We couldn't ignore our mother's passing but that day needed to have more to it than the sorrow we were feeling.
My sister thought about it for a while and came up with the following. We should each say a prayer of thanksgiving for our mother's life and how well she lived it. And then have a hot dog with everything on it to celebrate my sister's birthday. So amid the tears, we each said a prayer of thanksgiving for our mother and then had a really good hot dog. Because of the distance between us, we weren't actually able to be together for this experience but we shared pictures of our special meal, some of them complete with birthday candles. We had a fun time seeing what each of us chose to make our perfect hot dog and wishing my sister happy birthday.
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| Here are all four of us, ten years after the above picture. |
So for shared experiences with my sisters, I am thankful.
The rest of the story:
I am not sharing the picture of the hot dog I had because I put candles on it with my sister's age. She may not want me to share that for 50+ various reasons.
Also, sharing common things from a distance is something my sisters and I have started to do. On my father's birthday, we have ice cream to remember him because that was something he loved. We all share what we did whether it was a trip to the Dairy Queen or a big bowl of ice cream with chocolate sauce at home.
