As a Southerner who’d found his heart in New England, Minnesota was not my idea of home. Dawn said, “just give it five years.” Large life transitions often occur by way of the little tricks we play on ourselves. “Just try it,” we say, “it doesn't have to be forever.” So we do and then five years becomes almost fifteen filled with even larger transitions than we would have ever anticipated.

Had we known about the changes, we might have never risked it. “There is fire in the transitions,” Dawn would say. She wrote about them vividly in one of her dragon tales. Change changes us. The only way forward is through.

The fire of the past five years has blazed from life through death to new life. For Christians, it's a pattern Easter presses upon us year after year. The truth takes time to burn into our hearts. We resist because fire hurts as it burns, yet “resistance is futile” (as  all Christians and Trekkies know, Dawn being both).

And so Dawn died her beautiful death on Easter 2019, a fire that lit a new way and fueled a legacy that constantly refines us—stoked by memory, gratitude and love, but also grief, love’s shadow.

Not everything is a memory, however. Not too long ago, Violet was telling me some story, and as she spoke, her finger twirled her hair at her ear. “When did you start doing that?” I asked, with a bit too much animation. Her mom twirled her hair the same way, especially when engaged in a happy conversation or a good book. I made Dawn promise to show up now and then. Dawn shows up in Violet.

Violet is sixteen now, reluctantly learning to drive but liking to play her viola. She still draws (amazingly) and hangs out with her friends and her cat. Like her mom, she struggles with math and any sudden change of plans. She envisions life outside the midwest, perhaps a college closer to the coast where, also like mom, the ocean can thrill her soul.

I’m in my 60s and mostly retired now, taking a tapas approach to retirement—a bit of this and that, from cooking to beekeeping to a little counseling and biking and playing squash. My partner Shelley and I, the last of her kids off to college soon, dream about more travel and new experiences, glad for the ways our losses have found redemption.

I don’t write much anymore (people often ask). But I did feel the urge to write today—full of gratitude and love for Dawn and her fire—but also to you who helped us walk through.

And thus on this Sunday five years hence, remembering Dawn (for whom prayer was like breath), I offer one more from the Puritans to perhaps walk you through too: “O Lord, Thou art my divine treasury in whom all fullness dwells, my life, hope, joy, peace, glory, end: May I be daily more and more conformed to thee, with the meekness and calmness of the Lamb in my soul, and a feeling sense of the felicity of heaven. I am not afraid to look at the king of terrors in the face, for I know I shall be drawn, not driven, out of the world. Let me continually glow and burn out for thee, until the last great change shall come and I awake in thy likeness." Amen.