Alison's Sunset

On the afternoon of December 8th, 2015, our fellow high school classmate Alison Kettler passed away.  That same evening, unaware of the events unfolding in Oxford, while out Christmas shopping I was moved, perhaps by some unseen force, to photograph the evening's glorious sunset.

Alison was a good friend to me in high school.  Unfailingly sweet, kind and - I'll always remember - particularly generous.  In the intervening years, although I drove past her home a few times each week and sometimes she would be outside and we'd wave happily to one another, we hadn't spoken since those long-ago days of our youth.  No reason for this other than the great yawning chasm time forges between people.

Today her earthly remains will be laid to rest.  Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet of "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns."  Yet if you look again at the photograph, above, one may - I believe - see Alison in her sunset.