There’s not one day goes by I don’t think about why we’re here. The mystery of it all. That we are conscious now, and one day, we won’t be.

Not one day I don’t think about whom I loved in my life and who died anyway. My mother. My Aunt Peg. My grandmother whom I was named after but whom I never knew, and the other two whom I loved. My own Dad, in the end a frail, old man who knew his days were numbered, but kept hoping anyway, until he went “downhill very fast”. My cat, Sharky. Friends. David. Pete Regas. Locals. Hahle Gerow, a sixty-something woman with red hair whose beautiful voice lives on in our film; she died of a heart attack just the other night. Shook us all up, even though we said interiorly, "she smoked", as if to explain why. And Ray, an eccentric artist with long white hair who rode a bicycle and wore black tights. Ray who made the sculpture at the Roberts Creek pier, a guy with a smile in his eyes, the smile of someone who sees things and has a moment to think about them; Ray Jenkins flew off the windshield of a car across from the golf course one afternoon when the fog was so thick it made everyone cold; Ray landed on the asphalt and he lay there, lifeless, while they directed traffic around him.

There was a time, a fair distance ago, when everyone in my deleriously young circle of friends was getting married, or going to someone’s wedding, and the air was filled with glamour and expectation. In those days you could look at a graduate with a clever turn of phrase and a bit of eye-sparkle and wonder if she’d grow up to become President or win The Academy Award. That was how much possibility was in front of everyone. And then, there was the time when everyone was either going to the gym with Jane Fonda or having babies and getting fat. And then, it seemed like there was a time when people just a few years older than me were somehow not able to stay alive. Cancer mostly, although my cousin died of high blood pressure; and Pete, who was only 42, who smoked too much and lived a very stressful life, Pete died sitting in his easy chair after a day of driving through Chicago. His son found him, on the way back from the bathroom in the middle of the night. He climbed back in bed with his mama and said, “Daddy’s cold.”

So now, I see the gaps in my life where these people used to be. That’s where I am, wondering what he thought, or what she might have said, or if I could have been kinder.

Francine had to shoot a deer because some desperate creature had eaten it alive and I know I could wonder endlessly about this, but we're going to Italy on Saturday. Wake up girl, the plane's going to take off!