On This Day

Today, I am posting the last in my series of photographs from my spectacular/crazy trip to Hawaii and from my wayward driving adventures with Ariel Murphy, of the wildly dancing Murphy clan. 

Great and intense fun, that!

As I browsed through my photographs to find one that might typify the Hawaii I experienced, my thoughts turned back one full year.  On this date last year, the high sun shone on the face of my sweet Uyen for the last time.  Throughout this day, last year, I gave Uyen thick drops of morphine as she lay comatose in a bed at our home.  That day turned slowly and eventually ground into the dark of night, and somewhere in the night, Uyen—as I clasped her hand in mine—drifted away from me, never to return.

Here is a photograph taken along the coast of Hawaii a little below Pahoa on the island’s windward side.  Here something from this year.  Here, then, something from my second life—the one brought forth by the sun on May 11, 2011.

--Mitchell Hegman