One of the problems with celebrity culture that I’ve noticed these past few years is that as the variety of entertainment media has increased over the past century, so have the number of well-known entertainment figures who will eventually die. This hasn’t been so much of a concern with the Internet Age yet — I don’t think anyone can say that’s even reached a quarter of a century yet — but particularly as the actors who thrived during the post-World War II economic boom, to say nothing of the invention of television, have passed away at a greater rate in recent years, the old celebrity death “rule of three” seems to have faded away. Some days it seems like we get three big-name celebrity deaths between sunrise and sunset.

When people talk about the “dumpster fire” of a year we’re having here in 2016, they’re usually talking about the large number of celebrity deaths we’ve had this year, or politics, or (especially in my circles) both. Certainly the number of high-profile celebrity deaths can’t be denied (and some of them, like Muhammad Ali’s, would have cast a pall on the whole year by themselves), and regardless of how you feel about politics, there’s no doubting that there have been tectonic shifts in politics this year, especially here in the United States. For me, though, it’s been hard to really put any of those things into perspective when 2016 has also been the year when I had to deal with my mother’s long hospitalization and passing.

(Ironically, Mom had been the linchpin tying everything together: She didn’t pay attention to the news in her later years, so I was responsible for filling her in on what was going on around the world, which included passing along every celebrity death I heard of, just in case it was someone she knew. I can only imagine how much we would have commiserated with each other after Leonard Cohen passed away earlier this month.)

Yesterday marked a month since Mom’s long fight ended, and it’s been difficult for me to figure out just where I go from here. One of the problems of being a teacher is that you really have to commit to take care of your students for the whole term, even when you know (as I did before this semester began) that your personal world could be turned upside down at any moment, and I’ve had to keep going ahead with my lesson plans and such with all of my students. This is a blessing — I love teaching, and my students have paid back the respect I’ve shown them throughout the term by being patient with me — but when it comes to helping me deal with the ten million changes going on in my life right now, it’s also something of a curse.

Two of the classes I’m teaching will have their last sessions in a week, and another one ends about ten days later. Final classes are always bittersweet for me — the sadness of letting my students “out into the wild” and hoping that I’ve done some good in their lives, but also the recognition that I’ll have all new students to help out in a few weeks — but I’ve never had to deal with the end of a semester without Mom here. We didn’t necessarily converse about the specifics of what was happening with my classes, but she provided a core of support that helped me deal with all the twists and turns in my life, and the end of every semester of teaching is always kind of difficult for me.

Going into this next break, though, it’s not just the rigors of teaching that I’ll have to deal with, but how I deal with the world on my own. Even though I certainly have friends and colleagues who will help me over break (as they’ve helped me since Mom first went to the hospital in April), it doesn’t feel the same to handle so many huge changes in my life without Mom here. Even when I know for sure what Mom would say, and what advice she’d give me, it’s not the same as sitting on her sofa with her and telling her about everything.

There are going to be some huge changes in the next few weeks — stay tuned to the .org for a big announcement sometime in mid-December — but as horrible as 2016 has been for so many of us, there’s still a huge part of me that wants this year to never end, just because of the uncertainty that 2017 holds. This may have been a very bad year, but remember that there’s nothing to stop next year from being even worse.