Welcome to Friday – and Groundhog Day at that. I’ll try not to repeat myself. And I’ll also try not to repeat myself. By the way, some cities have the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day in theatres this weekend. Check it out if you’re looking for anything to watch this Sunday besides football. Of course, there IS the Puppy Bowl, with half-time kittens (which is also a great band name). 
 
February 2nd. 02-02. Dates and numbers are funny things. For example, eights show up a lot in my life and so I tend to notice them. Or maybe that’s why they keep showing up? I also keep track of dates and those elevens that occur so often for us, having lost Lauren on the 11th of May, her son’s birthday falling also on an 11th, my parents and grandparents marrying on the 11th, Dad being born on the 11th – things like that. 
 
And so, a few months back and thanks to an online game called Draw Something, I was made aware that a significant date was coming: the number of days since we’d last played our game together on our iPhones, Lauren and I. Somehow, three years later our match has just been erased – as well as those with two other friends – so I have had to let it go. I don’t know if I ever would have, otherwise, but that decision wasn’t left to me.
 
But here’s what Draw Something helped me to figure out. With the help of a calendar and a little math, I came up with the fact that this Sunday, she will have been gone for 1,000 days.
 
One thousand days. Feels like a moment; feels like a lifetime.
 
1,000 days alone would be a marker worth noting in my heart as well as on the calendar, except that it’s also significant in that it would also have been my mother’s 85th birthday. This February 4th – 1000 days since Lauren’s death is the date of my own mother’s birth in 1933. Isn’t that…interesting?
 

 
Mom left us six years ago this week; on February 1st, she suffered a catastrophic brain aneurysm while sitting happily having dinner on a TV table watching M*A*S*H reruns with my dad after what can only be described as a great day of laughter, cocktails with my sister and warm California sunshine. February 2nd, I flew out to be at her side and on the 3rd, Dad, my sisters and I turned off her life support.
 
The next day, February 4th (also a Super Bowl Sunday that year), was Mom’s birthday. We would wait until the eve of Lauren’s wedding the next year, in June of 2013, to hold what we called our “Momorial” for family and friends at the same little church in Jackson’s Point where Lauren was to walk down the aisle the very next day.
 
I love to think that Lauren’s and Mom’s spirits are together making music and laughing and watching over us all as we continue on as best we can without them. Have a gentle weekend. I’ll be looking for dimes.
 

 
This is how many I’ve found since 2015, minus one I gave to a homeless man who saw me pick it up. I bought this little dish in Seattle.