![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/_niPwTW3rBbU\/SLvWEOqVbwI\/AAAAAAAABMo\/LgrEuZgwzlw\/s1600-h\/forbetterorforworsebestever.jpg\")
<\/a>Sunday had a bittersweet quality to it. For me, at least, and I suspect for a few more, as well\u2026<\/p>\nLynn Johnson<\/a> ended<\/a> her long running comic \u201cFor Better or for Worse.\u201d<\/a> This has been flat out one of my favorite newspaper comic strips. And I say this as a serious fan of newspaper comics.<\/p>\n Originally she planned on this past Saturday and the Sunday epilogue being \u201cit.\u201d The end. But life is a mysterious thing, as perhaps you\u2019ve noted, things change in various directions, and she\u2019s decided to revisit her creation and continue running the old strips interwoven with new ones drawn in the original style to fill out the back story a bit.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll certainly continue to follow this new-old project.<\/p>\n But, here, I find myself more thinking about the passingness<\/span> of things.<\/p>\n Sometimes it is easier to look into this most essential teaching of our lives when the stakes aren\u2019t quite as high as this fact on the ground of our existence will inevitably present.<\/p>\n A little easier, I suggest, perhaps, when we\u2019re talking about the passing of a comic strip rather than the passing of a person\u2019s life.<\/p>\n And that can be a gift. Because the hard one will come. So, as the Sufis say, we need to learn to die before we die. And here\u2019s a very small death. Heck, one even with a half life to follow. And still. It can be hard\u2026<\/p>\n As the Zen poet Kobayashi<\/span> Issa<\/span><\/a> wrote on the occasion of his daughter\u2019s death.<\/p>\n