The interesting thing for me about my mother’s death five years ago today, from a strictly sociological standpoint, was the fact that it, in some fashion, took place in this blog.
I had written a post on Sunday, January 30 about my mother’s stroke two days earlier, and my need to trek down to Charlotte, NC. But I didn’t actually post it until Wednesday, February 2, the day she died. I was there when it happened.
When I finally got back to what had been my mother’s house and was/is my sister’s house, that afternoon, I eventually checked my email. There were several comments on the blog hoping for my mother’s recovery.
Then Denise Nesbitt, the doyenne of ABC Wednesday, emailed me and asked how I was. I told her that my mother had died. SHE must have contacted several others because I then got a wave of condolences from people, most of whom I knew but had never met.
If I ever find the need to cry, reading the comments to that post, quite possibly the greatest number of responses I’ve ever gotten on this blog, will turn on the sobbing.
The next day, I posted about her death, then the actual trip to Charlotte (written just before her death), then, after a Super Bowl post I’d written much earlier, mom’s obituary.
Three days later – thank goodness I write ahead – Mom’s funeral program. A week later, Random Post-Funeral Thoughts. Finally, the first part of my monthly rambling contained more musings.
What was useful in the process was the fact that my niece Alex, Marcia’s daughter, did a ton of photo scanning, some for the funeral, which I used in the posts. MANY of these pictures I had never seen, and others, not for years.
All of this was very therapeutic for me. Someone wrote, early on, that I seemed “detached.” It’s more that I felt that was operating on two levels simultaneously, one as the person grieving, and one as the journalist, for want of a better term, observing the process.
Speaking of therapeutic, a couple of months later, I recommended the book The Orphaned Adult.
When we got back to Albany, we received flowers from the aforementioned Mrs. Nesbitt, which was incredibly sweet. I went to church that last Sunday of the month when we sang Lift Every Voice and Sing, which I’ve sung for years. But I can barely get through it anymore without crying, and it started that day when I knew, profoundly, that my mom, and my last living ancestor, was gone.
