I’m not avoiding my mother, but I get tense when I see her on my caller ID lately.
We tend to stay in touch by email more than by phone, and if she calls it usually means that there’s something that can’t wait on email. We’ve lost five members of our extended family since October 2. We had absolutely no warning with two of those people. One was a young teen.
So as much as I love my mother, every time I pick up the phone to talk to her now I’m expecting bad news.
Uncle J was buried yesterday. He hung on for weeks, and they’d finally moved him to home hospice care just a few days before he passed. At least he wasn’t in pain at the end, and the family did get to say whatever they needed to say.
Mom is taking this really hard. She says it’s concern for Aunt B, and I’m sure that’s part of it. I can’t being to imagine the agony of losing your spouse of 48 years. I have to think, though, that some of it is Mom’s fear that it may be Daddy next time. I’m worried about her.
His father died last night. He didn’t want any kind of funeral. We’re going to see his mom.
A friend of my family’s, Claude “Dad” Ward, who worked with my father for many years, died this week. He was a good man, and he’ll be missed.
He wasn’t my father, but everybody who knew him called him “Dad.” I don’t think I even heard his given name for the first ten or fifteen years that I knew him.
He had battled myasthenia gravis for years, but what finally got him was weird–tuberculosis from a spider bite. After Daddy told me that, I thought he must have misheard something, so I Googled it–and yep, there are other cases of that happening.
I’ll think of him every time I see an Airedale or a raccoon 🙂
Back when the Meisha Merlin warehouse was being cleaned out, Sam picked up a copy of The Sword and the Dragon, first volume of the Epic Tales of the Five by Diane Duane that MM put out. It contains The Door Into Fire and The Door Into Shadow.
I’ve wanted my own copies of the first three Tales of the Five books for decades, since reading an old friend’s copies. I’m still disappointed that MM never put out the next volume, which should have included The Door Into Sunset and the never-before-published The Door Into Starlight. But then, there are other people who have far more reason to be disappointed about MM matters than I do, so I can’t fuss too much. And I have this volume, and will continue to hold out hope that Duane will find a new publisher who will bring out the others sometime in my lifetime.
Anyway, I had to stop reading to show this bit to Sam. It sums up much of what I love about Duane’s philosophy.
…death is inevitable. But we have one power, as men and beasts and creatures of other planes. We can slow down the Death, we can die hard, and help all the worlds die hard. To live with vigor, to love powerfully and without caring whether we’re loved back, to let loose building and teaching and healing and all the arts that try to slow down the great Death. Especially joy, just joy itself. A joy flares bright and goes out like the stars that fall, but the little flare it makes slows down the great Death ever so slightly. That’s a triumph, that it can be slowed down at all, and by such a simple thing.
We lost another great writer and thinker today. CNN seems to be updating their story on his death by the minute. There’s no controversy, but from the first version or two you’d think the only thing the man had ever done of note was co-write the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I know that he came up with more than just the idea of communications satellites, but at this very moment I can’t remember his other non-fiction contributions to the world. I’m sad, but 90 years is a good, long run.
