GOOD BY

Hello my dearest friends,



My dear sweet, kind and loving Aunt Annie died yesterday morning. The Mommy was with her when she died. It is too hard to let go. We think she held on until her brother, my Uncle Jimmy, got there and then, she just stopping breathing. Yesterday was her birthday....she was 82 years old.


Thanks from the bottom of our hearts, for all the prayers and kind thoughts for her and the Mommy too. She is where she has been wanting to be for a long time now, with her Mother and all of the others we lost to soon. The Mommy says she is sure Aunt Annie stopped at the Rainbow Bridge to get Samantha & her beloved Gizmo and they are in heaven now, looking down here & saying "look at those Doofusses down there crying their hearts out, when I am where I want to be.


My Aunt Annie didn't like a lot of load talking, like all us Italians do except her, and she used to say something that would shut everybody up. The Mommy laughed yesterday when she thought about it & so she said it one last time for Aunt Annie---



"PRAYO FINISH, EVERYBODY GO HOME!!!"

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I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and the sky come to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!"

"Gone where?"

Gone from my sight, That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear the load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!" There are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: "Here she comes!"

And that is dying. ------ Henry Van Dyke

Love Mona & the Mommy.