“Like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives.”

My life is not a soap opera, and I don’t watch them on TV. (Anymore.)

I was thinking about the opening of Days of Our Lives and how I have either watched or been aware of that show since I was an infant asleep in my mom’s arms when she didn’t want to get up to change the channel and disturb me. (Yes, back when there was no little device called a “remote.”)

I grew up watching this show and watched it faithfully until college. Strayed away for a long while, and then got temporarily re-hooked when on both of my maternity leaves and again when out for my surgery a few years ago. I’m pretty sure my early listening to MacDonald Carey may be at the root of my love of gentle, buttery-smooth voices.

It’s like a favorite old t-shirt that is still in the dresser even though it should have been let go long ago. It could still technically fit but only ever gets worn when picking through the sand grains one by one. Or old friends who are not far away yet the lives in our days keep the hourglass from ever making room for time.

Not sure where this reflection is taking me but I woke up this morning with a similarly themed song in my head – “On and On and On” by Wilco.

Take the jump with me as my heart just did with my brain:

It’s coming up on year since my Nana died. She loved Days of Our Lives. I live on and she lives in me.

It’s hard to believe nearly 365 days have slid through the hourglass of my life. Some whiffed by, others had to be stuffed through with a sledgehammer and some still I won’t let officially go from my grasp for fear of either losing them forever or losing myself once they are released.

Grief is a beast all by itself. Once multiplied with other sorrows and complicated by life’s triumphs, it becomes nearly insurmountable. Unless it can be shared and excised and, thereby accomplishing the one thing grief hates the most: survival.

“On and on and on, we’ll be together, yea.”