This past week included the fifth anniversary of Mom’s passing back in 2016. I wasn’t quite sure how I would handle this fact; five is a “big number” to get through, but the day also happened to be a day off for me because our parent campus scheduled our Fall Break for that exact day. From all the other deaths I’ve experienced over the years leading up to Mom’s, I knew that time did make the anniversaries less painful, but that there would be some…
Jim Steinman: Tributes paid to ‘the Wagner of rock’ (yahoo.com) I will defend Mom to the ends of the earth on pretty much everything of consequence, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily share her taste when it comes to people and media. She had her share of crushes that I could never understand — William Shatner, Franco Harris, Kevin Nash — and although we shared a deep love for several musicians, we definitely had some favourites that were incomprehensible to the other. Mom was a…
Americans plan Thanksgiving gatherings despite health official warnings (NBC via Yahoo! News) One of the smaller details I remember from the day Mom passed away is that I’d actually bought a ticket to a Halloween party that one of my friends was putting on that evening. I’d had misgivings about that party before I’d even bought a ticket, even though I was sure that if Mom had been able to articulate anything at that point, she would have encouraged me to go. I’d basically gone…
Today would have been Mom’s seventy-fifth birthday. Part of me wants to use the present-tense “is” in that sentence, since I still feel Mom’s presence in my life every day. (Today is not a good day to get me started on the vicissitudes of verb tense standards in different cultural situations.) In a way, it feels like that choice makes me focus on what might have been in our lives here if things had turned out differently, instead of what there is right now. Maybe,…
I was worried enough about the pandemic in the days leading up to our campus closing that I could feel my mind going to a very worrying place. For all the challenges I’ve faced after Mom’s passing, I could at least formulate some vague notion of the advice she’d give me if she were here in the flesh, even if they were challenges she never faced herself. A global pandemic that shuts so much of daily life down is something that neither she, nor even…