Thinking Out Loud

By Gerard Meister

When it comes to nieces and nephews I have a rather extended family. At last count I had, (and still counting!).

• Five nephews and four nieces
• Three grandnephews and six grandnieces
• One great-grandnephew and two great grandnieces

The good news about this is that my wife and I have the most wonderful family gatherings for the Holidays. The bad news is that with so large a number the law of numbers comes into play and last month I lost a bright and charming nephew just past his forty-fifth birthday. I am old enough to realize that God did not make a perfect world, but nonetheless. I was devastated by the unbelievable news.

So there we were sitting in the Ft. Lauderdale airport too numb to speak while waiting for the next available flight to New York (where most of our family lives). To compound the grief, my brother-in-law (the boy’s dad) was attending a pain clinic in Miami at the time and we made arrangements for him to fly with us.

For want of something to do I decided to get myself a cup of coffee. Walking to the Dunkin Donuts I wondered how my brother-in-law and sister-in-law would live through this and how would I? What’s life about? Is it worth living?

As I approached the counter I noticed the person in front of me for the first time: a young lady of nine or ten with blond pigtails clutching a five-dollar bill. The bloom of youth added a rosy hue to her cheeks and her eyes glistened with anticipation as she asked, “May I have a hot chocolate please?”

“We have no hot chocolate,” was the response. I checked the little girl whose lips quivered a bit as she turned to run back to her mother. I watched as the crestfallen child’s shoulders sagged while being embraced by her mother. My only thoughts were of the child, she became part of my world. Would she ever be happy again, I wondered?

Then as the mother led the teary-eyed beauty over to the next shop – a candy counter – the bloom came back to the rose, as if it was a new dawn. Now, the pig-tailed youngster looked liked she had just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting and into my life, which she truly did in the epiphany of life over death. It’s a choice at one time or another we all have to make. And in the next week that’s what the family did.

We had to.