2026 Life Logs, Day 254: A Beautiful Life
Date: Friday, September 11, 2026
Weather: Sunny; High Temp 76, Low 55 degrees F
Location: At Home with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
I am loving these beautiful September days. Even my sister in memory care asked me this afternoon if the sky will always be so blue. We have had a string of sunny, blue sky days that are not too hot and not too cold. Just perfect.
Today is the tenth anniversary of Mark’s passing. I spent the day trying to remember only the wonderful life we had together, not the sadness of it ending. And, of course, it was a national day of remembrance of 9/11. I spent much of the morning and early afternoon dealing with issues for my sister. Later in the afternoon I headed to Bridges to visit Patsy and we spent our time together out in the garden sitting in the sunshine. I picked Ollie up from his golf lesson on the way home and then I prepared a dessert to take to Heather and Jed’s for our Rosh Hashanah dinner. I asked Heather what she would like me to bring and she said, “Whatever you want to do to channel ‘granddad’. Well, Mark loved sweets and he loved chocolate. So, in the time I had, I decided to make a giant chocolate chip cookie. And Ollie and I stopped at Smitty’s to buy chocolate chip ice cream to go with it.
Before putting the huge cookie in the oven, I decided to place chocolate chips on top to form a spiral. When I arrived at Heather and Jed’s I told them this was not really a cookie. It was a story that they needed to figure out. Heather and Ollie didn’t see the spiral at first, but Jonah had one look and identified the spiral. Heather counted the chocolate chips in the spiral, which happened to be 82, and tried to identify the importance of that number. There was no importance as I had no idea how many chocolate chips I had used. But I learned that if you add the ages of my five grandchildren you get 81. But not 82. The reason I decided to add the spiral to the top of the cookie was a tribute to the way Mark lived his life. Some people are linear. Their lives go in a straight line. But Mark’s life was a series of spirals. He would put all of his talents and energies into one thing. And when that ‘thing’ ended, he would start a new ‘thing’, building on the lessons learned in the last one. The end of one ‘thing’ was always the beginning of another. There was never a failure, just lessons learned, and never an end, just a new beginning. It was a beautiful life.
