By Anna Von Reitz
I see him every day, looking back at me from the mirror: his fair skin and sunny eyes, the thin upper lip and Cupid's bow lower lip. I only have to glance at my hand to see his tapered fingers mysteriously allied to my Mother's broad palm.
More mysteriously, I feel his spirit blended to hers and to mine.
We are a threesome forever.
This would have been his hundred and second birthday.
Each one of these facts hits like a chime being struck, a reminder of life, and the time of my day.
I still love him and love them just as much, though he died in 1981, more than forty years ago, and my Mother, much more recently, in 2016.
She spent 35 years as a widow.
Another fact, echoing in the silence of this day. It's very quiet here at "the Spa". A fit day to recollect.
Seeing the span of empty years opening up in front of her, I asked my Mother early on why she would never date or entertain the thought of another man.
She just smiled and shook her head and looked somewhere off in the distance.
"That could never be," she said. "There will never be anyone like him again."
That precious idiosyncrasy that makes each one unique, however similar to others in other ways, left it's indelible mark on him: God's thumbprint.
Beloved always. Beloved forever. Those aren't idle words, when the right woman says them.
And just today, this day, I was talking to a good man, a Marine I have known for 25 years, facing his third undeserved divorce --- and I thought: there has never been a woman in his life with the strength to stand beside him.
They've all been whiners concentered all in self, worried about "me, me, me" and instead of helping him as a helpmate should, have left him to stand his faithful course, the object of pity and wonderment.
People shake their heads and look away.
I think of my parents and their happiness and I think of him. Even in her grief, my Mother was happy because of the happiness she had known, the one True Love in her life, shining like a beacon forever.
My friend has never had that, not even once in his life.
So I lift my Marine buddy up to Heaven today, asking on my Father's Birthday, that someone right and good will be waiting him, someone who will say, "Yes, beloved, always and forever." and mean it with her every fiber.
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