Today's my birthday, and it'll be the first to have come and gone without my Mom's traditional 5 a.m. call. That's the time of day I was born in 1966 at Magee-Womens Hospital, so that's when she'd choose to connect. Didn't matter where I was, how busy I was, how much I might've resisted or rolled my eyes as she'd wake me up to talk about the actual birth or simply stay silent and play a Serbian song ... it was always there.
Until today.
My Mom, Vlatka Petrovic Zgonc, passed in February. It's hurt like crazy ever since, but maybe more today than any other.
And that kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Because the ultimate connection that we have to our parents always remains at the origin point, always remains in ... oh, that whole thing about having created us. We're part of who they are or were. We're an extension. A continuation of a lineage. And the same, obviously, applies to our own children, grandchildren and other brethren.
When my brother recently visited with his baby daughter earlier this summer, I looked at her initially as I would any infant ... and then the way I would my own child:

DARA KOVACEVIC / DKPS
Proud uncle who legit wasn't responsible for that cap.
It's something else entirely, right?
About 20 years ago, I was in Cyprus, where my birth father was living at the time. I didn't know too much about him, and he wasn't the type to share. (World War II and the Nazis took both his parents at a young age.) One night, after he'd fallen asleep, his wife and I went through a collection of old photos. Not black and white, but brown and white, so really old. He was born and raised in Sarajevo, now part of Bosnia, and I was seeing his relatives/ancestors for the first time. Amazing experience ... and that was before the picture of a guy on a horse.
This guy didn't just look like me. He was me.
Both my father's wife and I were floored in the moment. She didn't know who he was, and there was no marking on the back. The surroundings, not least of which was that he was on a horse, strongly suggested this was the early 1900s. As did the guy's expression, which was that classic old-school super-serious staring straight ahead.
No, I don't have the pic. Wish I did. But I've got the moment. I've got the feeling I felt in that moment that ... man, we're all just one long thread, you know?
And on this day, I'm missing my own connection to that thread probably as much as the guy on the horse once did with his own mother.
Sorry for the personal detour this week. Wasn't really feeling like writing about the business. Wasn't really feeling like much of anything, to be honest. But I sat down to start typing up all our weekly updates for you, and this is what emerged.