A Goodbye

Welcome to the New Year, not to mention the new decade. Been a while since I've posted - 2009 ended badly. My mother died the day after Christmas - that puts a damper on things. She was a good woman (better than that) - she lived a full life, at least until her health started to go. She had heart surgery 10, 11 years ago - and since then, a series of medical problems, that slowly wore her down. She'd been on dialysis for the past three years, and in that period especially, she seemed to be withering away. She kept her mind, but her energy went, and she had to give up a lot of the things that filled her life - and I imagine, as she lost the ability to do things she had been doing (from doing the books for various organizations to her sewing and quilting, to being able to take walks outside), the enforced idleness contributed to her decline. It was startling to be reminded of all the things she had her fingers in - she taught for 20 years; she ran quilting classes and workshops; she kept books for the PTA, for the church, for the town cemetery commission; she worked for the town, she volunteered at summer camps, she ran quiz programs for kids - as well as running a family. It's hard to think of those things - because over the past dozen years, they all peeled away, one by one. Still - it was only this summer that things went really wrong. She had surgery on one of her legs, and never quite recovered. Every time I saw her this fall, it was a bit shocking to notice how much weaker she looked - I can't say her passing was a surprise. But when it came, it came quickly - itself something of a blessing, since drawn out deaths can be horrible, for the sufferer and family alike... Still, it hurts, and I will miss her.

I'll leave you with one of her quilts, one she worked on for years: