Looking through your wedding album
twenty years after a midlife marriage
you are quickly awash in emotions.
There is the joy of the moment, magnified
during the succeeding years, and
the rekindled memories of people
and moments of the day forgotten
or lost in the tumult that is attendant
on any wedding, first or second.
But there is a deep sadness as well,
at those now gone, parents expectedly,
but friends of your age, younger,
gone before you could say
a proper farewell, before you could
reshare the memories that
carefully shaped a friendship
over many years, before you were
ready to consider your own mortality
brought heavily home by their deaths.