One of those 'annual posts'...

I have made it a a sort-of "tradition" to post things on a semi-annual basis on this volume and this is one of those entries...the annual post celebrating what would have been the 23rd birthday of my daughter Angel, who would have celebrated it last Thursday on Halloween.

Adulthood.  She'd be in the throes of it at this point in her life and hopefully in some control of it.  I wasn't at her age and I doubt the amount of control I have of it now, but I would hope she would have had at the very least a grasp of it.  I often wonder how she would have taken to have being brought up had the split between her mother and I taken place when it was just her, before her brother was part of her family.  It may never had happened if she had been born, as looking back I often think that if you were to put a "starting line" where our marriage started circling the drain it was probably in 1996 when she passed.

That sounds unfair but a lot of hindsight and soul searching points to it when I work it out.

Seeing my son Sean now, nearly 20, on the cusp of heading into the first part of adulthood isn't really a good gauge of how her life would be as the older sibling because of course, he's a different person, but the other thing being that there was a distinct possibility that had she been born he might not have been, as Angel's mother had a rough pregnancy with her, (both of them, actually) and despite the fact that her mother and I both hail from two-kid family units, Angel might have been my only child...a role Sean has today.

If I live with any guilt about the five-years I spent married to Angel and Sean's mother, it's what I put her through during her pregnancies with our kids.  I know that isn't fair either but I saw her suffer and it still makes me sad to know that I was the partial cause of it.

I guess the reason I write these is first to honor her memory but to emphasize that though things have gotten easier over the twenty-three years since Angel's birth at rest it is still a very fresh event that causes me sadness.  It's said that parents never "get over" the death of their child and I can certainly attest to that.  Still though, I am comforted in the knowledge that she looks after her little brother and I as well as her mother. 

But I keep asking myself about how life would be with her around.

I don't know, and that's why I'm here.

That's why I'll be here next year.

Love you, little girl...and I always will