Ingrid played a meme that has the following rules:

1. Go to your Documents folder (on Windows this is called My Documents)
2. Go to the 6th folder
3. Post the sixth picture in that folder and blog about it.

As luck would have it, my 6th folder was empty, so I went to My PIctures folder instead and looked for the 6th folder in there. Unfortunately, it had only three variations on the same picture. Ingrid said she wasn't fussy and I could post whatever.

As usual, I don't explicitly tag people, but if you want to play along, then try to follow the rules stated as closely as possible, but feel free to be a little flexible. After all, they ar enot written on stone, just in a few glowing phosphors on your screen.

So this is the picture I came across:

 It is a picture of my mom and my kids. Today is my mom's birthday, she would have been 65. I went with Sofia and the kids to church this morning to pray for her. Jason said he sang her Happy Birthday.

The photo was taken about 1-1/2 years before she was diagnosed with non-Hogkin's Lymphoma. And she died about 2 years after diagnosis - 4 days after her 63rd birthday.

I miss my mother. It is not an aching, painful missing feeling. It is just the quiet sadness of knowing she is gone.

I had a good and full life with her. I have no regrets, no unsaid words, nothing that needs correcting. Perhaps that is why I only feel sadness and not pain.

I think there is pain when things are unresolved, or unsatisfactory. When we wish that something, anything, everything had been, could be different. And the pain comes from the conflict between what we want or expect or need and what we truly experience.

I feel blessed to have known my mother for almost 41 years.