My wedding band is a hidden cool circle behind a line of candles. This fall I've filled out court documents - Respondent, Wife - had the house appraised, parked in expensive Financial District garages to see even more expensive lawyers. Next to the ring I lay a single red rose whose thorns stab my palm. No vase, no water for this flower. Divorce is making my altar more painful.

I set out a picture of Rob, a lover of mine in college. He died last winter on a basketball court, his heart stopping just as he made a lay up, one sneaker untied. A creased obituary from my hometown newspaper sits next to a grinning sugar skull. Darien was our high school's majorette, and she died last month, of breast cancer. People my age die, I am realizing. I balance twisted willow branches in the corners; one tips, then falls. Age is making my altar more precarious.

A friend once pointed out that we unknowingly pass by what will be the anniversary of our death each year. Building an altar makes me feel the sharp poke of the spur; I am reminded that someday there may be an altar for me, too.

I pull peppery petals from the cempasuchitl flowers and shape them into a heart. I light a candle, and sit back on my haunches. A few blocks away, the carillon bells in the clock tower strike, and I bury my face in my hands, crying for a moment at the pain of endings and the agony of knowing that it's all too short.

My kids holler in the backyard; dressed in witch hats and pink capes and cowboy fringe, they play out the last few minutes of an autumn evening under the shower of orange leaves falling from the persimmon tree.

I take a deep breath and open the last bunch of flowers. I've never included sunflowers on my altar before; they seem too chipper and zealous, as if they're trying too hard. But I deliberately stand them at the back of the altar, sunny reminders to notice the beauty in the changes around me, even though the flowers themselves are dying, even though this is a memorial to the dead, even though we cannot shake off the heavy cape of mortality we all wear. Those bobbing, smiling heads remind me that this is what we have, and it has to be enough.

And then I call my children in for their baths, and afterward rub them with yellow towels, their warm, pink skin turning pinker. Each one tells me all the reasons he or she does not want to go to bed. All that they haven't yet done. All that they haven't finished. All that they haven't even started. All that they ache for - more time. Please, more time.

"I know," I tell my daughter in her perfect, curving ear. "I know," I whisper to my son, when he asks for the flashlight.

Suzanne LaFetra’s writing has appeared in many magazines, newspapers and literary journals, including the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle, Working Mother, Ladybug, Brevity, Smokelong Quarterly, Rosebud, and Pearl. Her essays have appeared in a fifteen anthologies, including the Chicken Soup, Rocking Chair Reader, and Travelers Tales series. She lives in Northern California with her children, where she is currently at work on a memoir about her love affair with Mexico.  Her website is www.suzannelafetra.com.

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