LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER

My cousin Christine is one of my favorite relatives.  She is unique and refreshing in her direct, unequivocating approach to life’s daily joys and challenges.  I have always attributed her authenticity to her upbringing, but never more than this morning.

Yesterday I had the privilege of being with Christine and her Dad Ken.  Watching and listening to them, together and apart, I was struck by their sameness.  Although Chris and Ken have lived on opposite coasts for over a decade and a half, it is their shared experience in the nearly three decades prior to their physical separation that accounts for the cadence, the syntax, the rhythm that they share in living their lives.

Though linked closely to family and friends, both are independent spirits.  Though concise with words, both are wonderful conversationalists.  Both listen with interest and compassion; both have a keen, often self-deprecating sense of humor; both emit a joy from within. Perhaps most interestingly, particularly in this world of endless activity often leading to inner tension and conflict, both live by an inner compass that impels them toward the important, away from the trivial, and into a serenity palpable in their company.

Christine and her three brothers lost their mother Marie in the prime of her life.  Yet they have remained especially close to their Dad Ken.  To hear Christine or Ken speak of Marie, she was the dominant and driving force behind their household.  After Marie’s passing, an unfillable void could have been left.  After all, when its binding force is lost too soon, a family can often splinter.  But Marie’s legacy lives on, not only in the shared memories of all of us who knew her, but in the way her family lives out that legacy in words and actions.  They remain close.  They are very much a part of each other’s lives.  They carry on the concern and the pride that Marie taught them in life.

As Christine and I have discussed, I know that when Ken or his three sons see her, they see, fixed in time, Marie’s inner and outer beauty and countenance.  She is the daughter, the sister, the lioness who magically carries her mother’s strong nurturing presence forward as a protecting force for each of their life’s paths.  I know, too, that when Christine interacts with her father and brothers she sees and hears Marie’s lasting influence on each of them… on all of them.  Memory of their childhood life with Marie is the shared part of their hearts.  They remember her by holding family life as a dear and precious gift. They honor her by opening their lives to others in the same caring, supportive way.

And so I watch Ken and Christine walking and talking together.  He has flown thousands of miles to be with the daughter that he and Marie brought into this world.  She has been filled with anticipation at his visit.  They will make many happy memories in their days together.  And as the texts and emails of Dad’s desert vacation circulate among four involved children, each cherished picture will be seen as a new memory among a sea of shared memories.  Every picture, every memory will add to the living testimony of how we can live each precious day of the present while remembering each cherished day of the past.