Shakespeare once penned in his play, MacBeth:

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time…

Time creeping in a petty pace?  I’m afraid not, Sir William! 

As I wrote yesterday’s date, again and again, I was reminded that it was my mother’s birthday.  Daughters almost always remember their mother’s birthdays.  My mother has been deceased for awhile now, and I paused to recollect how old she would be had she still been alive.  At first, my mind settled on 79.  Then I thought, no, wait a minute.  She was 73 when she died, and that was in 1993.  She would be 89 now if she were alive. 

The number 89 didn’t shock me.  What shocked me was the fact that she had been dead for 15 years now.  15 years!  How does 15 years go by so fast?  The memories of those painful fourteen months between the diagnosis of her lung cancer and her death on St. Patrick’s Day 1993 are still fresh, are still very much with me.  Everything about that experience is still with me, not so very far under the surface.   It doesn’t seem possible that a span of over 15 years separates me from that event.

Time is a strange thing.  It goes so fast at times yet it cannot separate a person from some experiences and emotions.  Some things will always seem like they happened only yesterday.