Dealing

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It’s been a year since my mother died.

How am I doing? Well, I’m dealing. I’m dealing blind against an unseen opponent in a game I don’t understand, but everyone smiles a lot and life goes on.

Look, I don’t want you to imagine me prostrated by grief. That’s not how this works. We all know our parents will, ideally, die before us. And mom and I… Chalk and cheese, you know? No, not like that. Or in some things exactly like that.

The thing is, a daughter like me is a terrible thing to happen to a mother who spent most of her life carefully filing down the sharp angles so she could fit in the round slot for the proper pegs.

No, she wasn’t repressed. Mom gave people repression. She was not meek and mild. People were meek and mild around her.

But all the same, she knew how to play the game, how to impress people the way she should, how to get across what she wanted to get across. She commanded groups, made parties wonderful, and could fill a room, just by herself, if she was in that sort of mood.

And then there’s me… I’m…. me. I probably could impress people, if I remembered and didn’t have three or four novels competing for my attention inside my head, at any given time. I was reasonably good looking and even enjoyed clothes and makeup… sometimes. And sometimes I forgot and went to the store in my painting jeans and with my hair pulled back. I’m actually (I didn’t know it) and introvert and some of our biggest fights were about her wanting to drag me to parties, because of course she wanted to, and I wanted to stay in my room with a book.

And then there were the things I was enthusiastic about. They baffled her. She knew what they were, she just couldn’t for the life of her figure out why I liked them. She tried. For my 19th birthday she went to the one bookstore in town that carried books in English and ordered the complete works of Villiam Shogspierre in English. And when they told her she might prefer them in Portuguese she said “I don’t prefer them at all. My daughter does, and she prefers them in English, thank you.” (Yes, she knew how it was pronounced. It was part of distancing herself from it.) I have better ones which aren’t tiny print printed in Yugoslavia (No, I don’t know why that was what they had) but I keep that one.

Sometimes she got upset about the things that fascinated me, as though by paying attention to them I was denying her and shutting her out. She once threw every book she could grab in my room out the window and into the farmer’s field out the back wall. It was a fit of fury at these books I carried everywhere. It’s been fifty years since she did that, and I still don’t understand it.

She used to get very upset when she caught me reading. (That’s what brought the fit on.) So I trained myself to fling the book under the nearest piece of furniture and sit very still as if I’d just been staring at the walls when I heard someone approach. Baffled my husband for a year until he figured out what was going on.

My brother and I used to talk in book quotes. Despite an almost ten year age difference, we had a tendency to be reading the same book, at the same time. In fact, until his eyes went bad, we’d often get there for a visit and he’d have the same book on his bedside table that I’d left on mine at home. (Only in Portuguese.) And we both had eidetic or near eidetic memory (in my case marred by being so ADD that…. well, you can’t remember what you never paid attention to.) So, when one of us would quote something we found significant in the latest book, the other would answer with a quote from the same book. It was like mad libs for autists, I guess, but we enjoyed ourselves greatly.

… At one point, after half an hour of this, Mom just yelled at the ceiling “I wanted normal children!” Followed by “I met my old classmate at the fair last week, and her daughter is a hairdresser, and her son has a garage, and they’re successful and happy and NORMAL. I wanted normal children.”

… Someone played a horrible prank on the poor woman, and gave her two changelings, even if my brother masks better than I do, or perhaps was never crazy enough to do truly outre things like marry a foreigner, move across the ocean, write books for a living.

I’d like to say she supported that the whole way…. but…. well, dad says she did. Dad says she was proud of me.

Maybe she was. She had a picture of me receiving the Prometheus on her living room table. I suspect it was because I was in an evening dress, wearing pearls and for once in my life had my hair done. “Look, my daughter. She’s not a bum ALL THE TIME, okay?” (I know, it baffled the presenters, too. BUT I’d promised my fans if I won I’d dress up.) On the other hand, when someone over there asked what I did for a living, mom would break herself crossing the room to scream “She’s a housewife” before I could say anything. (I might or might not have mumbled “the world’s worst housewife, maybe.”) And I won’t deny it hurt a little when I saw my colleagues mothers’ making a big deal of their books. I never gave mom copies after the first three — okay, in English, she wasn’t going to read them, but I thought she might put them in the front room bookcase? — because she hid them in the closet under the stairs, with the old shoes. And I — baffled! — have no idea WHY. Which to be fair, she probably had no idea why I was doing it either.

She was, however, a woman on the run. She was always doing something, cleaning something, designing something, whether a dress, a room, a table, a party. Her normal mode was at full throttle.

I find it somewhere between funny and ironic she fell running down the stairs, carrying a vacuum cleaner the cleaning lady had forgotten in the unused guest room. It could have waited another week. But it bothered her. So… she was running down the stairs, and lost count of the steps. She couldn’t see where she was because of the vacuum. They told us she’d broken her hip, and she did that too, but not that she’d hit her head because apparently concussions are irrelevant, but she’d hit her head on the umbrella cabinet hard enough to break the door, and I suspect had a closed-cranium concussion. I had one of those at 40. It’s different at 91.

I find that funny, because it’s the most mom thing ever. And if given the choice of that or going quietly in her bed ten years from now, she’d probably have picked going at 91, still on the run and doing things.

She used to call every Saturday. Usually when I was in the middle of my cleaning time, the phone would ring, and it was mom, which meant the next two hours were toast. I didn’t realize all the news from the entire family over there came through her.

I now can clean uninterrupted, but my Saturdays are… kind of lonely.

How am I doing?

I’m dealing. We never got along well as it were, but her presence and her personality, in approval and disapproval, and in the spaces between, shaped a lot of what I did and do, and how I did it.

For instance, I stole her smile. Perfectly aware I was not a beauty like she was, and I certainly didn’t have her way with people, I fixated on the one thing I could copy. My own smile was awkward and odd. So I sat in front of the mirror and practiced her smile until it became my smile. And I learned her trick of memorizing funny things people do, and then replaying them for the family, like a skit. Oh, and my house is 100% cleaner than those of my peers all the time, because …. what would mom say? (Nothing good, is what she’d say. We’re in the middle of a move and both houses are filthy.)

When she vanished, it was like driving along a Colorado road, and suddenly the mountains vanish. Look, you live on the foothills, you don’t do anything with the mountains. but suddenly they’re not there, and your world is curiously flat and colorless and why did they vanish? Where did they go? Can you even orient without them?

… I’m managing. Most of the time I’m fine, really, except suddenly, out of nowhere I hit something: a word, a phrase, a memory. A way to cook a dish I still do routinely. Her never fulfilled (often repeated) promise to teach me how to put in a zipper. (I can’t put in zippers in clothing. It’s like a disability.) Something. Sometimes just a quality of the light. And suddenly I’m crying. I’m not even sad, and I don’t know why I am crying, but there it is.

She always ended our phone calls with orders, “Go get your family in gear. You know they can’t figure their way without you.”

…. She has no idea. The boys are in gear enough. So is Dan. But mom meant that I should do what I can, I think. And was afraid I’d disappear into book and neglect the important things.

Do I do that? Sometimes. But then again, I love the boys. All three of them, even though Dan is a little superannuated for a boy. And sometimes they need me.

I try to be there for them, because I know mom expects it of me, so here I am, grinding through the speed changes the best I can.

I’m dealing. No one said this stuff was easy: mothers and daughters, the way we can’t help disappointing each other, the big love that has no need of shared interests to echo it, the persistent sense that you disappointed someone and you’re not sure who or how, the memories of shopping for shoes together, the ridiculously large ice creams she bought me and watched me consume, because she couldn’t… This weird feeling when someone who is so much a part of you is now a part of eternity.

I’m dealing. I’m getting the family in gear (I think the gear is turbo reverse parking, but hey) and I’m doing the best I can with all of this.

I can’t believe it’s been a year. And the horizon still retains the outline of the mountains that just vanished one day.

108 thoughts on “Dealing”

  1. I had a somewhat similar relationship with my father, although I just filled up notebooks instead of actually publishing until last year. He passed away in June 2011 and it never really occurred to me until 2025 that I could start sharing my “weird” stories with others…

    So thank you, Sarah Hoyt, for building a community that gave me confidence and a path forward.

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    1. THAT explains the weird publication dates! I looked at your Aurigan Conflict series a couple months ago when The Concierge of Hôtel Aurore was recommended on Sarah’s weekly book promo post. I saw the many, many books all published in 2025 and thought “I have no idea why Sarah recommended this author, publishing this many books so rapidly clearly means it’s mass-produced AI slop with no care for quality”. (Especially because the cover of The Absent-Minded Professor said “AI-generated image” to me. I don’t know why, but that was the impression it left on me. Probably something about the color palette, I’m not sure).

      But then a couple weeks ago (I think), I saw you mention something about “my Aurigan books” and I figured out that the author of those books was a regular commenter here, so that’s why she recommended them.

      But now that I know you wrote them over the course of decades, and only just recently published your whole backlist at once, now I will feel a lot better about reading them.

      See, I’m a bit burned out on AI-generated text, as it so often seems to have been thrown together by someone who doesn’t care about plot holes, and so I will usually drop a book the first time I even suspect it was AI-generated. AI tools can be used to produce good writing, but you have to have the human driving the tool carefully, and making sure it stays on target and doesn’t go off into tangents or drop half-finished plots on the floor. It’s kind of like how in my profession — computer programming — the AI tools are capable of producing good code, but you have to prompt them carefully in order to get that to happen. There’s a world of difference between telling the tool “Write me a Python script that does X” and then accepting its first output, verses telling the tool “Write me a Python script that does X. It must take command-line parameters Y and Z to control the foo and the bar. Make sure that you don’t do Q, because that’s a common mistake when trying to do X. Also write at least a dozen automated tests to ensure that parameter Y controls the foo, that parameter Z controls the bar, and that Q never ever happens.” The former gets you slop, which probably does Q about 35% of the time and therefore has a big massive security hole in it. The latter gets you a quality Python script that will reliably produce X every time, without ever doing Q.

      Anyway, thanks for letting us know why your books had such odd-looking publication dates (a whole series published pretty much at the same time was looking quite odd). Now I’ll feel a lot better about checking them out.

      Is there a particular book you’d recommend as a stating point for the Aurigan Conflict series?

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      1. Versus. Versus telling the tool, not “verses” telling the tool. That wasn’t autocorrect, that was fingers typing the wrong thing. I intended to type “versus” and didn’t notice that I had pressed the e instead of the u.

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        1. A chunk of stray history: Guy L. Steele Jr. was a classics major in the early 70’s who switched to computer science and wrote a full passel of high-nerd poems, including at least one in parallel Latin and English versions. (It was a Quaxity-Quuxity, IIRC, his Latin semi-deponent version of a Higgledy-Piggledy.)

          To wind this story to it’s salient point, he wrote one to a classmate, ending

          “I know that these verses are versus your pleasure./I hope you’ll feel free to respond in full measure.”

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      2. I really liked The Absent-Minded Professor and The Scholar’s Widow.

        The Aurigan Directorate are meant to be a sort of future bureaucratic dystopia not unlike The Nazis or Stalin’s regime in may ways; but they’re almost unnervingly polite, calling their camps Classification Centers. The Anglo Commonwealth are ostensibly the good guys; but they have issues too (see The Long Road Home, for example).

        Several of the books feature a couple of retired Anglo bureaucrats who cause trouble for everyone (see Form TR-9 and The Vacuum of Authority).

        [insert sigh implying a wish for a world left behind]

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  3. “you can’t remember what you never paid attention to” I’m not sure about that. My thought processes sometimes seem autonomous, running in the background and popping up with notions and ideas as if they came from somewhere outside of me, sometimes decades after the thought started. Perhaps we have multiple layers or ways of paying attention.

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    1. You can remember it if it’s short-term enough. There was one incident in high school I remember quite clearly: I was sitting in the library reading a book, when someone came up and started talking to me. I noticed she was talking to me about two sentences in, but I was able to replay the sounds I had heard from my short-term memory, make sense of them as words, and catch up on what she had said before she finished talking, in time to make a sensible response that sounded like I had been paying attention the whole time.

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  4.  “Look, my daughter. She’s not a bum ALL THE TIME, okay?”  Reminds me of months in my mid 70s (not the 1970s) when I decided to grow my hair and beard long after going most of my life clean shaven with a buzz cut. Hair and beard ultimately grew so unmanageable I kept getting one or the other in my eyes, nose or mouth. I went back to “normal” after two separate occasions of walking into Wendy’s in different neighborhoods to buy a chili and having people walk up to me and press $3 into my hand as if they took me for a homeless bum. I hadn’t even had time to make eye contact with them.

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    1. Damn, I must not look scrufty enough. I grew mine out mainly to please the wife but also as a disguise in a very liberal small NW town to hide my deplorable gun toting and Republican voting side from the general public. Never got any money from anyone, but then they were mostly bleeding heart liberals, and the real conservatives already knew me since we were a small cabal. Now I keep it cause wife likes it and shudders when I threaten to go back to giving myself ¼ inch haircuts.

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    2. Heh, opposite for me. In college (starting in 1970), I’d get a haircut every 6 months whether I needed it or not. Shaving was somewhere between annoying and painful, so starting from Day 1, the beard grew. There were a few times when I had to be almost clean shaven, but the mustache always stayed.

      After college, I’d get a haircut when it got annoying. Generally more often than 6 months, but the haircutters never got rich off of me. Fast forward to 2020 and Covidiocy, where you’d need an appointment, a face diaper, and dispensation from the governor (Despicable Kate Brown D-mented of OR) to get a haircut. Out came the clippers and a mirror. Every couple-three months, I get really short hair.

      Now, I’ve found that a full-face CPAP mask works far better for me than the nasal variety. Yeah, I sleep with my mouth open barring assistance. With partials out, there’s a gap wide enough to run a small jet engine, so new full-face mask. That in turn meant I needed to be at least partially clean shaven to prevent leaks. Norelco shaver FTW. Still have the ‘stache; there’s a scar in there from a bike accident that I’d rather not be reminded of every day.

      In town, I’ll dress up. Decent (Carhartt) shirt, Riggs cargo pants (IWB holsters and I don’t get along) and clean shoes. On the property, overalls in various shades of filth, a crappy shirt, and boots. The ball cap is a decent one for town, a grimy Stihl cap at home

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      1. My mother-in-law lobbied hard to get me to shave my mustache before my wedding; she thought seeing myself with a mustache in the wedding pictures would make me (her) unhappy.

        Did beard and mustache for a play in college; kept the stache except for AF Basic in 1971, and grew it back when I got home in March 72 (ANG, active duty for training).

        Wife went someplace in April of 1980 – recruiting for a college teacher in her department, IIRC. I decided to let my beard out while she was gone, and I’ve had it since.

        T-shirts, Tru-Spec cargos and IWB for me. But I live in town.

        —

        Two years, one month and two days since my wife passed (but who’s counting?) Still have a bad day every couple weeks, and few actual ‘good’ days. Not quite ‘playing out the string’ but it feels like that some days.

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        1. I had shoulder-length hair all through High School (hey, ’70s). Got to Basic Training in the summer of ’80, Drill Sergeant looked at me and went, “Heh, heh, heh.” 2nd day of inprocessing we went to the base barber shop for our introductory tonsorial travail. I asked for a regulation long haircut, eight passes of the clippers over my pate and Private Cueball was staring in horror at himself in the mirror. And the final indignity – we had to pay for the privilege. Now, any time my hair grows out long enough for it to start tickling my ears I get a feeling akin to what most folks get from the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard* and have to get reshorn.

          *I actually like that sound. But then I like the skirl of bagpipes in the morning.

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          1. As memory serves, the mustache came off immediately after the bike crash. The helmet kept my brain intact, but I put an incisor through the lip. To keep the wound clean, I had to remove what hair I could. The slightly different colored crown is reminder enough, I’ll keep the rest of the results covered.

            What used to be red-brown is now gray with a wee bit of brown. It works for me, and $SPOUSE never complained. MIL didn’t get a vote. :)

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          2. I had a fairly short, regulation cut done the day before I got on the bus to Fort Benning. On barber day at the reception station the barber asked what I wanted. I laughed and said, loudly, “buzzcut the hippie, sir!”

            The Army provided chits for the haircut, so “free” (out of my taxes)

            Punchline: one of my Drill Sergeants was a licensed barber. He offered free haircuts, usually when he had CQ or some other all night duty. Your best move was “early”, as by o-dark-30 he got both sleepy and creative.

            Imagine a high-n-tight, but canted like a beret.

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        2. I grew my mustache over the summer before senior year HS. OLd fashioned RC school with two senior privileges, smoking and mustache. That was 46 years ago and I haven’t shave the mustache since. The last picture of me taken without it was my yearbook picture.

          My mother hated it and offered me $100 to shave it, which was money back in 1980. Nope.

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      2. Husband had a ‘stach from well before he could grow one until about two years into the Navy, when he ended up in some situation where he looked up his dad’s public records…and saw his mirror image.

        So when I met him, he was totally clean shaven.

        Now rocks the Xanatos look about 9 months of the year.

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        1. I can’t grow a mustache. Full beard yes, mustache no. The hairs above my lip keep coming in straggly and thin. So I shave my mustache and the few hairs I have in the sideburns area, and grow a beard everywhere else. I have several times been asked if I’m Amish, to which my usual answer is “I’m a computer programmer; I’d be a terrible Amish!”

          But my favorite story is when my family and I were heading to the airport gate in NYC. We noticed a LOT of people who were obviously Orthodox Jews, very obviously Orthodox, walking in the same direction as us, and I figured there was a plane flight to Israel with a gate near ours. (Which turned out to be correct). As we approached the corner around which our gate was, there was a table to one side of the hallway, where an Orthodox Jew was sitting, offering people small books; I figured he was handing out copies of the Torah for anyone who’d forgotten to bring his own copy. He was only, I noticed, offering them to the other Orthodox Jews; this wasn’t a proselytizing attempt. As I walked down the hallway, getting closer to the table (though not clearly approaching it, I was planning to walk past it), I saw the guy lift his arm as if he was going to offer me a book, then actually look at me, and lower his arm. I figure he saw my beard out of the corner of his eye first, then actually looked at me and figured out that I’m not actually Jewish.

          So now I can say that I was once almost mistaken for an Orthodox Jew because of my beard.

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    3. My wife has told me I look like a homeless person a couple-few times when I’ve let the hair and beard go wild, but nobody has pressed food money on me in public…yet. 😅 The town where I live doesn’t have any stereotypical homeless (small university town in the middle of nowhere; the “homeless” here are college students crashing on somebody’s couch for a semester, and maybe once a year, some lone panhandler hangs around for a week before the police tell him to get lost), so that might have something to do with it.

      I grew a beard at 18 because I wanted to see if I could, and I really hated shaving anyway. Turned out I could grow a pretty heckin’ good one, and with the exception of a brief stretch where my soon-to-be-wife wanted to know if she could stand to look at me clean-shaven (she could, but I looked way too much like my younger brother, and it kind of freaked both of us out), I’ve been rocking facial hair ever since.

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      1. That’s because WAshington is full of jerks.

        … ok I’m joking but only a little?

        I’m still kinda humiliated by folks who gave me a 20 to buy the kids a treat at Taco Bell.

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    4. I never really did the long hair thing, because when mine gets enough slack it turns into Einstein hair. Did the beard thing for a span of years and then decided I was over it. Shaved it off and never let it grow back.

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    5. My father’s mother, when he was ten, put down her foot and insisted on a buzz cut. He wore it for the rest of his life, but in the last month, he was too ill to have it cut. He — looked odd in his coffin.

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  5. My Mom will be gone 10 years, this December- the moments still come, I’ll want to ask her a question and… she’s not there. May all our deceased mothers Rest in Peace.

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    1. My Mom’s been gone for 50 years, and I still occasionally ask her questions. Dad’s been gone for over 10 years now, same deal. I wonder if both of them are saving up the answers for when I see them again?

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      1. My last memories of my mother are traumatic though. Just prior to her last hospitalization, she asked me to do something I’d never done before; help her reattach her ostomy bag because she was losing the strength and coordination to do it herself. But I didn’t know it at the time. Consider a teenage boy with his mother half undressed and crap all over the place and no clue on what to do. Yeah. Didn’t go well. Dad got home about a half hour later and they trundled her off to the hospital. Two days later I saw my mother briefly in her room, and she was already raving and didn’t recognize either me or my brother due to her liver and kidney’s having shut down and poisoning her system. Two days later and she was gone. Still hurts even now. So yeah, I appreciate having some memories and feelings like she’s still here but beyond all this.

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          1. Thanks Foxfier. Considering the number of people throughout history who lost their mothers early in life, often due to illness, childbirth, violence, I have personal perspective on just how much that can mess with someone’s head, warp them, and provide motivation for any number of things. Not easier, not acceptance, and not really empathy, but more like understanding. It doesn’t excuse bad behavior or bad choices; because we all still have the choice of what to do with it.

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        2. It isn’t any better if you know what’s happening.

          RN.

          Mom was admitted for an infection and complications thereof. There’s a minimum kidney output we learn: 25 ml/hr. If you’re that low, you’re really sick. Healthy is size-dependent, but more like 80-100 ml/hr.

          Mom emitted 25 in a day, and stopped. She was on ‘comfort care’, low dose IV morphine, so couldn’t talk to her much. But wife and sisters were there. I knew her kidneys had failed and there was no coming back. (She knew about kidney problems; she directly refused the idea of dialysis long before that ending event. Need Dialysis == DNR)

          I had forgotten just how much of a wreck I was at her funeral.

          Similarly, when my wife got her cancer diagnosis. Great doctor, very supportive practice, did all that they could do. But I knew the numbers. I understood the words.

          I spent 6 months in terror, and the last month crying. How my wife could be so composed I’ll never understand, but her friends have told me she was very worried about me.

          But I never shared what I knew with her. I thought it would be cruel to squash any lingering hope. I did tell our children they needed to visit, because the end would be soon.

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    2. Dad had his last heart attack at 53; I was 18, and was just starting to relate to him as an almost-grown adult. Took a while to adjust.

      Mom made it past her 99th birthday, and died on Mother’s Day in 2022. She remarried (on my 21st birthday), but that was senior year at college, and I moved from the Midwest to California, returning for visits at odd intervals. When my stepfather passed (he was getting ill, Mom couldn’t take care of him at home, so it was nursing home time. A couple-three days later, his heart gave out.) $OLDER_BROTHER called with the news. Flying home wasn’t in the cards, but I could do the drive. Took three nights, but I made it. Mom called me her rock.

      I called every couple of weeks. She eventually sold the condo and tried a retirement home. I drove back then, some 9 years after the funeral. Various reasons (expensive place, plus less-than-honest relatives [glares at one brother and his daughter]) meant she had to leave the center and move in with family [same brother, sigh]. Multiple reasons why Flyover County wasn’t a option, not least deep roots in the midwest. They made it out for a visit a couple years after my trip. Kept in touch, then dementia started. Her last year was tough, though I got all the news from said brother, a decidedly unreliable narrator (and IMHO, a prize jerk). A certain amount of Official Notice was obtained, but Mom was still staying with $OLDER_BROTHER, with social worker keeping a close eye.

      At the end, she went into residential hospice for a sort time. We called the center a couple days before she passed; the nurse put the phone next to her ear. Mom couldn’t speak, but the nurse said she recognized our voices.

      I saw the end coming. I’m doing better with Mom’s absence than dealing with the realization that $OLDER_BROTHER is a truly horrible person. When we evacuated and returned, I called $OLDEST_BROTHER and his wife. No idea if the $OLDER even knew about the fire. Or cared. (It’s a “minor” fire by 2026 Oregon standards, only 50,000 acres. And one fatality. Cause “undetermined”, though the rumors are interesting…)

      Arggh. It’s dusty in here. Mom, I hope to see you in Heaven.

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  6. Hugs, I know that losing a parent leaves an emptiness in the heart. Both of mine are gone now, dad since 09 and mom since 2021. Still find myself wishing I could talk to them, tell them how things are going and show off their great grandkids. Let your heart be at peace and believe that someday all will be reunited.

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  7. I hear your voice but you’re not there
    I turn to look but you’re not there
    Simple things. Small things. Anything.
    Echoed silence fills the air.
    I wait. I sigh. I sorrow. I pace.
    Fitful memories. Fading pictures.
    Void of presence. Void of face.
    When I want, I cannot find you
    When I don’t, there you are

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  8. Its been 30 years for me. Dad fell and broke his hip at 92, but Mom had a cancer and a stroke long before. Many parallels between your Mom and mine though. I was going through old scrapbooks I don’t remember looking through which I had attributed to Dad but were hers. From before High School and through civilian then Navy and eventually meeting Dad and ending with me as an infant in her arms and her looking down and smiling. I was doing OK UNTIL THAT PART. So much she never shared with me. I had to sit hugging those albums for a while.

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    1. Had my wife’s baby pictures and kind of went through them with her.

      But I am cleaning out the garage, and came across her high school yearbooks. I had never seen those. Interesting to see her 14-17; we met at 18.

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  9. “… This weird feeling when someone who is so much a part of you is now a part of eternity”

    This reminds me of my mother, who was brought up Native American and didn’t learn English until she got to 1st grade. She declined to teach her kids her mother tongue, said she couldn’t remember it well, which contradicted the many times we saw her sitting with native friends, chattering away in a foreign tongue. However, she was full of stories in English, of her native friends and relatives, living and dead, which she repeated countless times. She did not share many common beliefs about death. To her, everyday life, death, and eternity were simply always present to us and always alive. 25 years ago she “walked on” as her native friends describe death. Talk about weird feelings….

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  10. “Well, I’m dealing.”

    Yep. Eventually muscle memory builds enough that you don’t step in the hole they left behind every day.

    But I still don’t drive through our old neighborhood where our house is. It belongs to somebody else, but it’s still “our house”. It’s a nearly physical pain. Two years ago I’d cry every time.

    Mine both went the hard way. I’ve not clung to those memories, let’s just say. The memories do inflict themselves on me fairly regularly though, because a thing once seen cannot be unseen. I think your mother wiping out down the stairs was a far better way for a lady like that to go, having seen the other way. I’d chose wiping out on my bike at 91, if anybody asked me.

    We get what we get. I try not to be angry and bitter, because nobody suffers but me. Any time for recrimination is past, and really most of the things I get angry about are stupid. I admit it. Petty, and stupid. If I didn’t speak up at the time, there’s no point dwelling on it now.

    So hold your head up, give all the bad memories the finger, and drive on. Maybe both fingers.

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    2. Hugs.

      We’re still working with the lawyer to see if it’s worth going through probate to get the vacant lot where the house used to be. He’s supposed to be sawing down the liens and the realtor will tell us if the value she can get for it is worth it.

      I’m reasonably sure Dad would be in favor of selling it for whatever we can get.

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      1. I was fortunate in this regard, all the arrangements were made ahead. The old man took care of it all and left us kids a couple of bucks as well. He did good, yet another reason not to be salty about stupid stuff that happened 40 years ago.

        Steer with your knee and flip those memories off with both hands as you drive on. That’s how you do it. ~:D

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          1. That’s good, Sarah. I’m glad to hear it.

            Me, I’m assailed by old memories from time to time. I’ve learned to let them blow past, swamp gas on the wind. Double salute, keep driving. Maybe a little power wheelie just to speed the smell on by.

            Nothing like a wheelie to focus the attention, I always say. ~:D

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  11. My mother passed away from cancer on December 7th last year. I was packing to go to the Philippines to marry my fiancee. Aside from running around to get the last bits of papwerwork for us to get married, I had to get a form noterized that said I agreed to her body being cremated. I still miss her a lot. I did get to have one last pizza lunch shared with her the weekend before she passed. I almost feel like she was waiting for me to come see her before going on the next leg of the journey. I had a really good relationship with her and I would call her at least once a week during my hour long drive home. I miss that.

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  12. Take care Sarah.

    About beards, I have a beard for reasons.

    I shaved it off one time and it was amazing that people at work knew something was different but couldn’t pin it down. [Crazy Grin]

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    1. Hubby kept his stash, always. But only grew a beard in the last 37 years, once. “Daddy broke his face!!!!!!!” put a stop to that.

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      1. I’ll never shave my beard, for two reasons. One would be that yes, I would get the “Daddy broke his face!” reaction: I had my beard before I met my wife. The other, more important, reason is that my wife loves the beard and has asked me never to shave it off. She’s seen pictures of beardless me in college and finds them weird to look at.

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  13. Five years this fall. My mom was much like yours, Sarah. Glamorous in her youth, always active, able to do so many needlecraft things she never had the patience to teach me (including putting in a zipper!).

    And she kept the studio portrait from my first (brief, failed) marriage in the living room for years, long after I found and married the love of my life. Why? Because I was wearing the heirloom wedding dress that had been handed down from my great-grandmother. Displaying the portraits of everyone in my maternal line wearing that dress was more important than how I felt about that marriage. (She did eventually take it down — at least when I was visiting!)

    Dementia took her from us before death did. But she came back for a last few days of lucidity, long enough to say goodbye. Chalk and cheese… yes, I miss her every day.

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    1. Mom had Dementia and my sister Ruth had said that Mom didn’t know her when she visited Mom.

      However, the last time Ruth visited Mom, Mom appeared to know who Ruth was.

      Mom died a couple days after that visit.

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      1. That is a mercy that hurts like heck.

        Of course I have one to share.

        Mom’s mom was … a lot, though nowhere on Sarah’s mom’s level… and she had a favorite daughter.

        Her near clone, really.

        Dementia, and she no longer recognized that daughter. She’s recognize the daughter she “hated,” and chew mom up one side and down the other about why her favorite daughter wasn’t there, but not recognize that daughter next to mom.

        Right before she passed, that daughter went in as she did every day, to visit mom.

        And Granny saw her. Recognized her. Talked to her. Looked over, and greeted mom’s late father (Papa), and favorite aunt, and several other siblings. I’d have to double check, but I believe at least one of them had been dead since before Granny was married.

        She didn’t wake back up after that.

        Papa died after malpractice.

        They unplugged him, after… a time.

        Just before he died, though “vegetative,” he very obviously recognized everyone there, and said Granny’s name.

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        1. That happened with my grandfather. He was in and out of consciousness, but “came to” when my mother and I walked in. The nurse who was there said that “surface to say goodbye” was somehing she had seen repeatedly in 25-30 years as a nurse.

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            1. That shows up so often that I think it’s a good indicator of life after death. The brief return of coherent thought just before the end, even though the body is so horribly ravaged, seems to indicate that consciousness separates from bodily function. It gives, hope, to the rest of us.

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  14. I am better than my mother at many things. And not just as her senile decline takes hold. I do totally understand that “WHY are these things important to you?” concept. (She places huge importance on having short/ curled/ styled hair, matching outfits, etc. I did dutifully try these things when I was younger but I never Got It.)

    My father died eight years ago. I did not weep at the funeral. (Dad was a real piece of work.)

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  15. Fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. Sigh. My parents are 13 years gone now and I miss them every day, but not at all in the same way. My mother never approved of my wife and never got “Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh.”. Sigh.

    She was outgoing and graceful and when she died the cars in the funeral procession stretched out of the graveyard and down the road. She also cared what other people thought of her, which my sisters, each in their opposite way, do. I don’t, never have. Strange in that I’m just like my Da.

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  16. Big hugs, Sarah. Much of what you wrote–“chalk and cheese”–describes my mom and me. Enough to bring tears though she’s been gone since 2021.

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  17. My mother was a warm, sweet woman who wanted a daughter that would play with dolls, have tea parties, and dress up and do traditional stuff when I gold older (born in the 1960s). Instead she got a daughter who liked playing with hot wheels, had very outspoken opinions, and never cared what other people thought. Although I’m proud to be me, I feel bad that Mom never had the family she wanted.

    Mom’s been gone eight years. I feel her presence often, and I miss her

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  18. It’s hard to be an Odd daughter with a normal mother, though admittedly it’s probably harder still to be a normal mother with an Odd daughter. Relates to my belief that it’s harder to be an Odd woman than an Odd man in general, but that’s another post.

    Like yours, my mother has never quite “got” me. At this point, I’m resigned to it. I have a large section of the closet devoted to all the clothes she has bought me for various birthdays and Christmases that I will never, ever wear. At first, I tried explaining why these things didn’t work, but I just came off as ungrateful, so I gave up and just devoted a rack to things labeled “Dry Clean Only” and sweaters that make me itch like someone just released the mosquito army.

    But for all that, I love my mom so much, and I know she loves me. And as her health has gone rapidly downhill over the past two years, I’m terrified of losing her. I know it will happen someday, and probably soon, because she doesn’t come from a long-lived family, but please, Lord, not yet! I’m not ready to be an orphan.

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    1. Relates to my belief that it’s harder to be an Odd woman than an Odd man in general, but that’s another post.

      K, this one is fun, and you should write up a guest post for Sarah on it.

      Because I think you’re right.

      However… I think you’re right because girls, in general, are better at making it so folks never realize they’re Odd.

      So you get the…what did Sarah call it, “mommy eating snakes in the kitchen at midnight” effect? When that “normal” patch breaks.

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      1. I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective (I’m too far Odd to mask), but it probably is hard on the girls who play the role, and it gets worse underneath. Pretending to be someone you’re not is never easy.

        I was thinking more the general trend, where men are focused on results, women on the group. A man who goes his own way but ultimately accomplishes what he set out to do…well, success is its own justification, and most men will probably give him a grudging respect. A woman who accomplishes the group’s goal but does so in a way the group disapproves of, will be hated by most other women, all the more so because her unapproved method actually worked.

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        1. “men are focused on results, women on the group.”

          Men compete on results. If you’re faster/better/tougher than the other guys, you have to be very obnoxious for them to care that you’re Odd. So IF you’re in a trade or something, being Odd isn’t that big a deal. (In an office your numbers better be huge. Different environment, more backstabbing.)

          Lately I’ve been seeing some of these “candid camera” videos taken in airports and crowded venues. There’s a series of a tall blonde dressed in a red stewardess outfit, she looks like a million bucks. Going on an escalator, standing looking at her phone, walking with her travel case, whatever. Minding her own damn business, essentially.

          The camera focuses on the crowd. The men try not to stare. Their interest is obvious, occasionally creepy. (Ladies, as a man, my apologies. Some of my fellow men are super creepy.)

          The women though, oh my god. The undisguised hate! The poisonous looks! “How DARE that b1tch stand out like that!” It’s amazing, honestly.

          Harder to be an Odd girl, for sure. Super hostile environment.

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          1. Lately I’ve been seeing some of these “candid camera” videos taken in airports and crowded venues. 

            I’ve seen those too. And my cynical side wonders if we’re not seeing the latest advertising technique, where the seller has set that up for an image search on the central figure’s outfit along with the message “make the guys drool while serving your female competitors their own livers when you buy this”.

            It’s advertising that doesn’t show up as “scroll past the ad”.

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            1. This.

              My family does a lot of people watching– and it’s very rare that I see folks being super obvious. Even when they can do it without much of anyone noticing– I even tend to catch the other people watchers!

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      2. That sounds right. And those of us who gave up trying to fit into the girl-group patterns caught more flack from boys and girls. Girls because they have to protect the group identity against an outsider, and boys because … well, probably in some cases, they are trying to impress the girl group, and in some cases because the bright pink monkey is an easy target because the group won’t protect us.

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      4. Foxfier said

        K, this one is fun, and you should write up a guest post for Sarah on it.

        I concur. I myself have no direct experience of this (being Odd but Male), I have observed it in my wife (strongly odd) and Daughters (one mildly odd, one seriously odd about the same as Mom). What I do observe is that relationships are far more critical to female development and self-worth than to males. In male cliques, the goal is to stand out and be unusual/superlative. But in female cliques a strong part of belonging comes from shared experience, and the Odd seem to have a great deal of difficulty of partaking in this.

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  19. Hugs. Seriously – my mom is still alive… well, breathing, anyway, but in all other ways she is gone. Has been for quite a while, since she fell over one of the dogs and fell so badly (I think she must have struck the kitchen island on her way down) that she broke enough of her spine to be essentially paralyzed from the shoulders down. She had already lost Dad – but the paralysis meant that she lost everything else that she loved; the house, her garden, her hobby of glass-cutting, the social life that she had in the community. I am far away in Texas with my daughter and grandson. I would write every week, send pictures … but eventually my daughter and my sister told me that she wasn’t interested and not even to waste the postage, as Mom wouldn’t even look at the letters.

    We’ve already said goodbye. Now we are just waiting. I always thought Mom was more of a fighter … but I guess not.

    Hugs again.

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    1. A piece of advice, perhaps unwanted:

      Learn how to fall. It will help you through middle age at least, and may help turn a crippling fall into one that hurts a lot but is recoverable even later on.

      Buckle your knees. Roll. (So you don’t fall headlong.) See what you’re falling towards and change direction. Land on your big muscles. If you’re going downstairs, set yourself to fall backwards, not forwards.

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      1. I regularly advocate this, but the learning is best done before bones are brittle and getting up again isn’t so darned difficult.

        My wife and I came at it through martial arts – learning a break fall is pretty handy.

        The other thing is ‘keep your head up’. If you find yourself walking and looking down, it often happens that you will see the ground coming up to meet you.

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      2. Not only learn to fall but if elderly get a head CT. As we age our brains shrink bringing back shaken baby syndrome brain effect. In US, if on blood thinners, get a medical bracelet or necklace stating so.

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      3. Another piece of advice that it’s never too late for is strength training. I do barbell lifting because I’m still in my 40’s, but anything where you can slowly add weight is good. A set of dumbbells, or one of those dumbbells that’s a small bar that you can add weight onto. And squats with a weight.

        Building up your muscle mass will help cushion your bones if you fall. People with strong muscles, even if their bones are weak, break bones much less often when falling (and fall much less often anyway) than people with weak muscles, I’m told.

        Though if the bone is weak enough it sometimes won’t make much of a difference: my paternal grandmother, who lived to be 99, had such weak bones by the time she passed away that when she fell and broke her hip, my dad (who was taking care of both her and my grandfather, his own dad, at the time) said that he suspected that her hip broke first, just from no longer being able to support her body weight, and that’s what caused her to fall. Though she managed to hold on long enough to outlive her husband by two weeks; my grandfather, who had been suffering from dementia, died first, and my grandmother (who was clear-minded the whole time, and helped take care of her husband emotionally in his dementia) died thirteen days later. I figure she had been holding on for years just for her husband’s sake, and once he passed, she finally was able to let go. They’re both in heaven with the Lord Jesus, whom they served all their lives, now, and I can only hope they’re proud of me.

        My parents then took a long vacation after that: it was more of a relief than a blow to my father by that point, as he’d been watching them decline for the past decade. I had gotten a list visit (that I knew was a last visit at the time) with them less than a year prior, and told them about the girl I had met that I knew I was going to marry, though at that point the relationship was still fairly new. (Funny thing is, I have the same first name as my grandfather, and I married a woman with the same name as my grandmother!) After my grandparents died, my parents flew halfway across the world to visit me, and they met my not-yet-fiancée (now wife) in person for the first time during that visit. So all in all, it was about as emotional-pain-free as it could have been for me, and even for my father (who lost both his parents in two weeks) it was more of a relief at that point than a blow.

        I set out to talk about strength training. When did this become a catharsis comment? I don’t even have much emotional pain from missing them, other than wishing that my grandfather had not had dementia so that his last years would not have been nearly so much of a burden on my father.

        Oh, and now as we have weekly Zoom calls with my parents, I’m watching my father start to be less sharp and clear-minded than he was when I was a kid, while my mother appears to be just as sharp as ever. But my sister is the one living in the same town as them, while I’m halfway across the world. I’ll just have to provide emotional support, and perhaps money since I make more money than my sister does (though I saw the balance of my parents’ retirement savings account once, on a document that was lying open on their desk while I was visiting them for Christmas. I don’t think their money will run out before the end of their lifetime, so probably my parents will be able to pay for their own medical care. Still, I’m going to offer if it’s ever needed). But I’m going to share with them the advice I heard once, that it’s a LOT easier to get the power of attorney document(s) signed while the elderly parents are still clear-minded, rather than going through the difficult process of getting a judge to declare them incompetent once dementia sets in. And I’ll suggest that they get a power of attorney ready for my sister and/or for me, which we can get notarized when I visit them this Christmas. Just to be prepared.

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        1. ditto on the weight training. To the protection add how much better you feel after the first few days. Start with low weight and every couple of weeks add a pound or so, if you’re stronger, go faster but don’t push too fast because you’ll hurt yourself and have to start over. If you can do the full body barbell lifts, then do them or use the machines, there’s no shame. I also like kettle bell swings, and especially weighted carries as well as steel clubs, which add twisting to the mix which is great. A little lite cardio and you’ll be fit as a fiddle in no time.

          I’m 64 and have been back to heavy resistance for about three years now. It’s life altering in a good way.

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      1. My beloved was working for the stereotypical Big Corporation- the sort that believes your every waking moment should belong to them. He was headed to work on a Saturday, as usual, just after telling our then four-year-old he had to miss the T-ball game. Our son said, “That’s ok.” And then he heard that song on the way in.

        He was unemployed and looking for a new job two weeks later.

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        1. I made a similar move when I left the bank. I was commuting to Chicago from NY and was only home weekends, if then. The wife said “there’s more to life than money.” I got a significantly less demanding job, which paid a fraction what I had made, but it was the best decision of my life.

          I asked the wife not so long ago how it would have been different had I continued at the bank and she said “you’d be dead.” Which is also probably true.

          The real lie of the corporate life though is that your loyalty and dedication will be appreciated and rewarded. IT won’t. Never take one for the team because the team won’t take one for you.

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  21. When my mother died at 101 she wanted to go. Physically miserable, functionally blind, unable to do so many, many things that she had done so competently before. And I still wish she were here…. When I find some tidbit of family lore I wish expounded on, … well, that library burned down. All the questions I still have about so many family things, the answer book is closed. Frustrating. But we cope, yes?

    Nicely written, Sarah, thank you for bringing up some memories of mothers. I think….

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  22. Little sister– the cool one, the pretty one, the nice one, the popular one; great with kids, sheer magic with animals, nobody disliked her– was ten years gone, about two weeks ago.

    This of course hit badly with all the Famous Deaths, including the threefer of last week.

    ’16 was bad for losing people, too– David Bowie? Alan Rickman? Carrie Fisher?!

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  23. Nearly fifteen – no, sixteen years – and the thoughts still come. The “trick” is to remember and reinforce the good memories, and let the bad ones fade (if anyone has had a perfect relationship with a parent, well, I haven’t met them yet).

    Side note – for being presented with a “changeling” of a daughter, she quite obviously did one hell of a good job raising her.

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  25. Have not caught up on missing12 days (close to 1000 comments, not counting those that pack).

    Presume Sarah passed some of this on. But, I am back.

    Mechanical Aortic Valve replacement with Aortic nip and abrasion (afib), occurred Aug 21, 2026, after not one but 2 delays. Was timely. Very timely (given how quick it all came down). Surgery doctor and team pleased with outcome. I have to apologize to whomever in the system got delayed because I was in ICU and the the Cardio Surgery floor a lot longer than expected. It is not just doctor & team scheduling, it is ICU room and followup care in the surgical wing. I had to have a followup procedure called Aortic Conversion (shock) in the ICU to move on. Then in the surgery wing got delayed by a couple of other things. Not helped when they had trouble blood draws (not new). I blew out 2 IV lines before the 3rd held until discharge (the nurse was going “um …”, when it was pulled). Problem was getting me stabilized. I was released/freed today, Sept 1, at noon.

    Puppy happy I am home. Cats? They are cats.

    Otherwise. I love my “Heart Pillow” (if you know, you know).

    Surprises? Packed too much for surgical unit floor. Just right for ICU (i.e. barely anything). Did make sure my sleep apnea device was handy after first 24 hours. Some discussion on putting me on CPAP because O2 stats were low. Except O2 stats were low whether I was awake or not, with or without apnea device. Yea, not the problem. Solved.

    Water weight gain! OMG! Total by surprise. Thought I’d have to send mom to buy undies and muumuu. Did not. OTOH not wearing any shoes I own anytime soon. Just call my shins, feet, sausages with toes.

    Overall. Much better.

    Thank you for everyone’s thoughts and prayers.

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    2. Good to hear that you got through it okay. People in contact with Sarah knew you were in the ICU longer than expected (I heard secondhand), and there was some worry.

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      1. For the most part I was too sick to care. Just aware enough that I knew Sarah did not get the “she died” email from mom (mom knew better). Just not sick enough to send Sarah “still alive, in ICU”, twice.

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      1. This group means a lot to me. I knew the prayers and thoughts were there. Glad I could pull through for all of you.

        Long recovery to go. But things are processing. All a matter of everything was almost as bad as it could have been, went downhill fast when it did, but came out through the surgical process better than hoped (did NOT have to make the aortic valve slot bigger to get the right sized valve in, which the surgeon was not thrilled about having to have happen; doable, just not optional). Only to have complications (cardioversion required) hoping to avoid (after all the preexisting afib was treated in surgery). Then anything else my body could throw at it. Not that treatments did not work, they did. Just overworked. Which triggered something else. Cardioversion required after mechanical valve placement fix is not unusual. Cardioversion to fix afib when the afib was fixed too, is. Then after cardioversion worked and I was moved out of ICU, the high heart rate with irregular beat, not quite afib. Resolved on it’s own. Then HR fine, but if I did anything physical at all, the BP said “my turn”. Once my teams realized we were going “what else was new?” to the medical reaction over reaction (w/o being actually allergic to anything), it was a lot easier for everyone to pivot.

        I will say this much finding the AFIB when I did saved my life. Without pushing the AFIB, the valve problem would not have been found until it was severe. It was mild a lot longer than my diagnosis would indicate. Going with decades longer. Timing was everything.

        Which is only one reason of why I am willing to share all this. If what I have gone through even remotely causes any of you to act and saves you or your loved ones? Bigger win.

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        1. The Reader had high blood pressure controlled with medication before surgery. After being home for a week, he ended up in the ER when blood pressure fell to 80/45. That resulted in elimination of all pre surgery blood pressure medications. Three months later, his blood pressure is still normal without meds. His resting heart rate however stubbornly refuses to go below 80 (it was 70 before surgery). Cardiologist attempted chemical cardioversion 4 weeks after surgery to lower heart rate with no impact. Cardiologist and surgeon are both baffled. They told the Reader surgery would have no impact on his blood pressure. They also think that the heart rate will revert ‘at some point – maybe’. The good news is that heart rate in the gym today only went to pre surgery exercise levels while doing pre surgery level workout.

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          1. Does not take much to raise the BP. As in move. Got to the point where I’d go to the bathroom (moved), and back to bed/chair. BP would be taken; high. Wait 30-45 minutes, taken again; still higher but not the critical high of original reading.

            After cardioversion HR stayed good except for one hiccup which self resolved.

            Day 2 home. Strong restrictions still (for weeks). Not to mention hovering by hubby and son. They really do love me!!!!

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    8. Keep careful track of your blood oxygen. Beloved had water weight gain after ablation and it put him back in the hospital for four days.

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      1. Do not have a way to check O2 levels at home.

        Yes, I know. O2 levels had them concerned in ICU. Talked about putting me on a CPAP to sleep (I wear a TAP appliance for obstacle sleep apnea and was) until they realized levels were low whether I was asleep or awake. Response was “Ummmmmm”. Higher O2 flow initiated until O2 stabilized.

        Very strict guidelines on what is “bad” weight gain (through water). Also initially a problem post surgery and even once converted and moved to surgical not-icu unit. For awhile I was on dehydration medicine intravenously 2x/day. Now by pill 1x/day.

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        1. It might be worth grabbing an oximeter. They run $10-20 on Amazon and in these parts can be found in Walgreens, CVS and at Walmart for similar prices. As a lifetime asthmatic, they can warn me of incipient attacks that my brain is ignoring. Although these days the long term treatments have gotten so good I rarely see issues anymore.

          I’m vaguely surprised that some of the more advanced APAPs don’t come with a Bluetooth oximeter to help with the monitoring, as blood oxygen levels are a classic issue with Apnea. Probably it is not done likely due to cost and certifying them for FDA.

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        2. Amazon is filled with wireless O2 meters, defib boxes, O2 generators, full-dress ECG machines that connect to your laptop etc. If you’re going to be a little shaky, it’s worth getting that stuff, IMHO. They’re –cheap– these days. Like really cheap.

          Sticking a few electrodes on and emailing the graph to your doc is pretty convenient.

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  26. Hugs Sarah. It is hard.

    Not something I have had to face, yet. Did have a little fun with it in the hospital. “Who is your visitor?” ….. “Mom.” Pause because they know I am 69. Yes. She’s 91 (92 November).

    “biggest fights were about her wanting to drag me to parties, because of course she wanted to, and I wanted to stay in my room with a book.“

    –

    Looks around. Might have happened between mom and me too.

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  27. I’m fortunate in that Mom is only 70 and in great health. Her mother is 103 and wondering why Grandpa hasn’t come to get her yet.

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  28. I stayed with my mother during her last three years. Life had led to a sequence of events that led to a separation from my wife, and an eventual divorce. I thought my stay would be short, but after watching her over a few days, I realized she was struggling, and needed someone close.

    She had increasing dementia (forgetfulness…not Alzheimer’s), which left her struggling with remembering the last few minutes, but led to long conversations of her past. Nobody else in my family had that experience, and it was a golden experience for me. Her passing didn’t leave a strong grieving because it was a blessing to relieve the results of a broken hip, advanced dementia, and her loss of dignity. Her passing left an unfilled emptiness for conversations with her, the sharing of her experiences, and a purpose to ensure she was safe. Someone that has had a similar experience can relate. Someone that hasn’t doesn’t have a clue about how what some may find as a burden leads to a fulfilling, rich experience that can only be called a blessing.

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  29. It’s hard to watch a connection to history pass. I’m not minimizing the importance parents have, but there are so many things, so many familial connections, I’ll never have access to now.

    My dad died in ’74. While shocking, we were never that close. My strongest memory of him was sitting together in a beer joint (Sharky’s, outside of the Kelly AFB gate), drinking a long neck Lone Star while I had a coke and a bag of chips. He never talked about his family or history.
    My mom’s death was pretty hard, but at the same time comforting. I’ll tell you sometime; miracles are sometimes right around the corner, even in grief.

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