"Time, she is a cruel mistress."

Thinking about Jessie's children yesterday put me into a bit of a reflective mood, which is always a chance for me go to a more melancholy place than is particularly healthy for me. Well, maybe "healthy" isn't the word I want; maybe "useful."

As I'm sure you've noted in the past, I tend to spend too much time analyzing the past, and and entirely too much emotional energy on regretting things I can't change. One of the great themes of my life, when it's written, will be the abundance of regret; the longing to go back and change things.

I'm not as bad as I used to be, certainly, but I'm not exactly the live-in-the-moment ideal that I'd like to be.

Anyway, the new photos of the kids put me in mind of some old family photos of ours, and I was sorting through them last night. If ever there was a pastime that screamed "oh, if only..." that would be it.

There's nothing quite like torturing yourself with if-only-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now scenarios, and I'm well and truly the king of that shit. Last night, most of them were revolving around my "innocent" youth, and how I'd like to have dealt with the nuttiness surrounding my brother's death.

Not long ago, Chris and I were talking about his belief that families "freeze" in place when a member of the family dies -- that emotional growth tends to stop or at least slow down for a very long time, and family members get stuck in the particular roles or attitudes that they have at the moment of death. From my perspective, it certainly seems true of my family. It's only in the past five years or so that things in my family seem to be shifting; there's a thaw -- an emotional detente.

I'm getting to know my brothers and sisters again; learning to like the people they've become. More willing, in the case of the ones against whom I've had simmering resentments with roots in that time, to see their side of the story, to understand their journies.

I'm looking forward to the day when we can talk about what happened both before and after Bill's death. There's so much about that time that I either don't know or don't remember.