Play this, please, and read.

Sunday afternoon we had occasion to go to Dundrum for the weekly supplies. On the way back this song was playing on the stereo.

It’s the song that plays in Blade Runner, when Rachel discovers/confirms that she in fact is not human, but a replicant. Despite having memories of a mother, and a childhood, she in fact has been alive for less than a decade. She has no mother, and in fact is not connected to any person in the human race at all.

I know what its like to see my mother’s body die, and to have that daily grief in my life, but obviously for different reasons. Rachel looses her mother and her sense of identity as a human in one swoop while mine passed away last year after a gruesome battle with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Her passing has taught me a truth of the Universe: it doesn’t matter how much you love something, or how tightly you hug it to yourself in a desperate effort to keep it, or how much your soul is built upon it. Time will take it away from you and  the world. You might be there to see it, you might not. But its time on the earth is finite.

Now we have a child; a little connection to the future. He carries my soul with him everywhere, and so I fear terribly for him, fear terribly the loss of him. He’s a magnificent invader on all the barriers and fortresses I’ve built up over the years. Nothing I say or do will stop me caring enormously about this person, about his care, his safety, his experiences and his opinion of me. I can’t help that. I’m connected to him, tied to him and to his father in a vulnerability I’ve never had before. But you can’t fear a loss if you have nothing. You can’t have that fear of a loss of a connection if you are out in the rain with nothing in your pockets. When you’re within by the fire is when you’re at risk, and that is the scary part.

So I’m left with this. All that I adore will one day be gone from this earth. I only get this time allotted to me. I simply must make the most of it. It seems that, these days, each experience has the potential to hold to the highest purpose in a way it never did before. I wish all of you the sense to never take your place by the fireside for granted.