We all plan ahead–usually fun things, a dinner out, a weekend party, a tropical get away. My cousin, Doris, bought a tombstone. When her dad died suddenly, her mother purchased a grave marker. She did the same to make things easier for her younger sister. She was resigned to being her niece and nephew’s ‘old maid aunt’. The stone sat in the cemetery ready and waiting.
Doris had been involved in a relationship that went awry ten years earlier with nothing serious since. She was in her thirties and expected to follow in the spike heel prints of her dad’s only sibling, Aunt Florence, who was a single, career woman in LA.
John Kennedy was elected president and started the Peace Corp. Doris spent two years in Venezuela as one of the first volunteers. When she returned, she began an office job in a Beloit, Wisconsin, factory, twenty-five miles from her farm home. She met Bob, who worked in the manufacturing part of the building. He had recently moved into her community and they began carpooling. Their rides together fostered a romance. Doris was forty-something when she became a bride. I stood up with her just as she had for me when I was married six years earlier.
Doris changed everything to her new last name except her tombstone. When Aunt Florence passed away a few years later, the monument company recycled Doris’s marker for the elderly lady. Even plans literally etched in granite can be altered.
Are you thinking about changing plans you felt were carved in stone?