Stay Gold

My dear mother is the kind who would gather up her children on one of the days of early spring, take us outside and recite the poem "Nothing Gold can Stay" by Robert Frost--which, I can still repeat verbatim. She was careful to point out that the gold we could see in the quaking aspen trees in our front yard was just the kind new-gold that Frost was talking about and that it never lasted very long so you had to celebrate it while you could.

Her tendency to quote poets and post vocabulary words around the house is probably the reason that I don't remember if the quote by Emily Stone, "The decision to have a child is a momentous one...it is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside of your body," was one that she had posted to the cabinets or if she whispered it in our ears when we were heartbroken or had skinned knees.

Both of these quotes have been rattling around my brain for the last couple of days. In July, I am preparing to travel with a group of families from Park City. Each of these families have lost a child in the past year. Their combined children are known as the PC5. If you go to their website 5 young, beautiful faces stare back at you. In a world where children are taken by drunk drivers, in car accidents, in falls while hiking and mysteriously in their sleep Stone's quote becomes something of a warning and not just a touching commentary about parent's relationships to children.

I amazed at what the families of these 5 teenagers have done. This is the news clip that ran on a local station last night.

ksl.com - Park City moms turn tragedy into opportunity

Shared via AddThis

The premise of the Frost poem that my mother used to quote is that things that are young and beautiful (like tiny leaves in spring) can't stay that way. I think he's wrong. I believe that the service that these women are providing is the way that they are keeping the memory of their children gold and new and beautiful.

Please support them--show them that you believe making something wonderful out of a great loss is worthwhile. We're getting a team together from Ascend to run/walk the 5K on Saturday. Please join us. We'll be sporting our Ascend t-shirts. And don't worry; some of the interns are good runners but I'm considering puff-painting my Ascend t-shirt to say, "I run....slowly." Let me know if you'll be there and I'll bring extra puff-paint for you too.