With Easter Sunday falling one week from today, my thoughts have been going back to Easter Sundays from years gone by. Two of these holidays, in particular, have been less than uplifting in retrospect.
The first was when I was sixteen and the house my family lived in, at the time, burned down. I documented this with observations of how different family members responded to the conflagration. That, and a weird, albeit true, account of a UFO sighting. I hope they got home alright.
The other Easter came years later when I had my own wife and four kids and we had been living in our rustic cabin for a few years. My wife was not home and I was, with my twin girls (14), their little brother (9), and the youngest daughter (4). I got a phone call from my mother, letting me know that her mother, my maternal grandmother (yes, the one who grabbed the ham to save it from the fire), had passed away. She was 72 and my mom said she felt that grandma had known something ahead of time. She (grandma) had insisted on bringing the Easter goodies to her daughter and my much younger sister the previous Friday. My grandmother was very close to me. In a phone call during the winter preceding her death, she had requested that I come and visit her. At the time, I begged off by pointing out that the 4600 mile round trip would be financially and logistically impractical at the time. I suggested maybe the following summer would be a better time, when the kids were out of school. She expressed doubt that she would be able to make it until summer. I chided her, "Oh, grandma, don't talk like that!". She changed the subject, asking after her great-grandchildren, and that was the last time that we ever spoke.
There are scores of Easter Sundays that were simply lovely. Family getting together, kids being dressed fancy and hunting fancy eggs. Those memories blur softly in technicolor. Easter Sunday is one of my favorite holidays, but it will always have a shadow (or two) upon it.