Just a quick note...
...to let you all know why I haven't been blogging for the past couple weeks.
After many years of fighting with illness, and multiple organ failures, my mother passed away peacefully last Tuesday night.
I'm doing ok, overall, but haven't had much motivation to write. Everything is still very surreal to me. I'm not sure when I will resume writing in earnest, or if I will comlplete the 100 Days to Offload this year. I'm also not sure if I will participate in Writing Month at all this year. (But I don't anticipate a terribly long hiatus, in either case).
I'm currently combing through over 200,000 photos stored haphazardly on an old backup disk (along with some duplicates, which I'm attempting to identify with md5sum) to collect photos of my mom for her upcoming Celebration of Life.
I've noticed one theme over and over again:
She's not looking at the camera maybe a quarter of the time. She was often looking to the side, at others.
The reason?
She was always more interested in making sure everyone else was happy and having a good time than looking pretty for her own photos.
Selah.
The Scenes that Made Me: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Lars looking on wistfully while ingesting his sister-in-law's retort to his rant
Video clip
Content warning: this post unavoidably and briefly touches on some "mature" topics
If you had told me six months ago that one of my favorite movies of all time would be a bout a man who …
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The Scenes that Made Me: Star Wars
Luke looking wistfully out at the dual sunset on Tatooine as The Force Theme plays hauntingly in the background, beckoning him to his grand adventure
Having grown up in the 1980s, one thing random friends would often ask me (actually what family friends would ask my mom) was: "Has he …
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I really wish the Fediverse had more permanence
One of the things I hear people on the Fediverse celebrate is its incredible transience. There's no one big central network, so posts have nebulous reach throughout the network, depending on how well-"connected" your instance is, and many people set posts to auto-delete after a set period of time …
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The Last Stage of Loss?
Last night I had one of those "your loved one isn't actually dead!" dreams, but about my cat.
I used to have them a lot about my stepdad that passed away many years ago, and I had a handful about my boss that sadly ended his own life a decade …
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Love is a choice
I was going to go in a different direction for tonight's blog post (thanks to the help of some kind fedifriends), but while starting on that post, I felt like I needed to revive a blog post idea from a few weeks ago first.
A month and four days ago …
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A Grief Exchanged
The working title of my previous post was, "A Grief Exchanged."
I couldn't quite make the title work in my head, so I abandoned it for "Adoption," which still works well.
I'm re-claiming that title for this post, because I can make more sense of where I was going with …
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Adoption
I wrote six months ago about the process of mourning and also my struggle to find another cat to adopt.
There were a couple times that I had visited with a cat at a shelter and slowly warmed up to the possibility of adopting them, only to find that the …
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A Grief Fulfilled
Just moments ago, I removed the cat bed that's been on the corner of my bed for the past nine months, and placed it in the closet.
Minutes before that, as I walked into my home, I called out to my cat one last time (which I had done nearly …
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Six Months a Mourner
Content Warning: This post deals with the loss of a pet. Also, Christian themes.
This will probably be my last post on this subject for a while. I do not wish to labor the point, but today marks the sixth month of my cat passing, and I felt that I …
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