Before reading today’s blog, I would encourage you all to check this blog post from my friend Emily Pratt Slatin, who lost her mother yesterday. “I Answered The Call, Then Let The Silence Win (October 17, 2025).”
The post is both poignant and revealing, it’s raw and it’s unwavering. It’s another part of what we all know as our final moments. And in those final moments, we wonder about our families and friends, will they remember us in good times, will they forgive us for bad times – did our existence on this spinning amalgam of rock and water equate to anything.
We all deserve a full life, with every excitement and joy and love packed into it. There is no guarantee of a tomorrow. Life can be yanked away from us in an instant. But how are we remembered?
I’ve lost so many people on my personal journey. Heck, two years ago I chronicled sixty different people who affected me in some way during their lifetime, but passed away before my 60th birthday.
I remember each time I read the news. Or when I heard it online. But when it comes to a parent … the emotions are super-charged. Your parents are your primary nurturers and educators and protectors. You want to please them, you want to make them proud that they gave you the blessing of life upon this earth.
But there are moments when your golden images of them develop feet of clay. And what some people perceive as sainthood from a parent can devolve into anger and poison and terror. And you look at your neighbors and see your best friend’s parents all happy and pleasant, with the Norman Rockwellian idyll of home-cooked seven-course meals and family trips in the nicknamed station wagon. Those same parents who years later you find out were hiding abuse and assault behind those manicured picket fences.
Death comes for all of us. It is true that we know not the minute nor the hour of our final breath. Nor will we know what happens to our loved ones and friends after that moment, as our consciousness and our memories and our internal existence will disappear like the display of an unplugged alarm clock. Even with that, it is still so very important to live a good life on this earth and enjoy every breath, every eye blink, every aroma, every whisper.
on a personal note … my parents passed away a long time ago. Both my parents and the two people who, after my biological parents broke up, became my step-parents. All four of them are gone. For other members of my family, these people are sainted and loved. It’s different for me. So many things happened to me in those homes that even at 62, I still can’t get past.
If you do have a moment today … contact someone from your past. Your parents, your siblings, your best friend from across the street who was part of your neighborhood bicycle crew. See how they’re doing. Check in on them. Talk about their stories. Anything. Recipes. Memories.
Because saying, “I wish there was more time to tell you I love you,” or “I wish there was more time to forgive you,” or “I wish there was more time to prove you were wrong about me” – is hollow when those words are mentioned at the funeral.
Chuck The Writer 
Something I am all too familiar with.
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