Courage My Love - January25, 2011

Where does the time go? Zipping by like the TGV. It's not that I haven't blogged for the last two weeks, it's just that I haven't published my blog. So, on this side of the fence, the weather sucks, we are in the darkest days of winter, works sucks, we are still laying people off and life sucks, my son in law has cancer in his eye.

It is very difficult to be upbeat today, but if I can think of three things that are good, then maybe it will restore balance in my universe... it's supposed to be sunny tomorrow, we are ever hopeful about the weather, I still have a job, which means living indoors and eating warm food, and the cancer will respond well to radiation.

What I have been doing these last two weeks is the mundane bits of life that seem to consume me these days. I clean the house, I do the laundry, I go to work, I get groceries, I bake, I cook. Silly me, but I am actually looking forward to adding gardening to the list. I am also writing a story. I have always had the creative side of my being, and that has usually expressed itself with my camera or my paints, or some other "artsy" part of me, but it has been a long time since I have written anything but a blog and email.

So therein lies the challenge, a plot, characters and satisfying prose all wrapped up in a story. What started this story, was sadly - an obituary I read in the paper. I know, I know - you are thinking "Oh my god, what a loser, she reads the obits". Well let me tell you at my age, it is a pretty satisfying thing to do, on two levels. One if I am reading them, then gosh, I am not in them! Two, it is sadly reassuring that a lot of people are dying that are a lot younger than me, so I must be doing something right...

Anyway, there was this obituary that caught my eye. I read it, then I read it again, and then later I went back and read it one more time. I thought to myself "What the hell??".  It went something like this .... (with the names changed of course)

Mary Beth Smith passed away on Saturday. Mary was born in 1923 in Wherever, Canada and lived most of her life in British Columbia. She and her husband Joe raised 5 children. The last 18 months of my mothers life were filled with pain and suffering and indignity. If I and my two children were sole custodians of her care, we would have ensured that she spent her last days in a place where she would have thrived, and left us in peace. Thanks mom for hanging on until we could say our goodbyes. No service by request.

Jeepers, that's nasty. Or is it? Is it sour grapes by some child who was not the primary care giver, or was there some other story behind this. So I started to think about what could have happened both in Mary's life and in the lives of her children, to have arrived at a place where you would leave such a vitriolic obituary.

That's where I am, writing about this woman's story. About abandonment, about loss of dignity, about the end of life, about families and how they explode, and about how the hate that is left acts like acid on the soul. Yes, writing, like dying takes courage my love....