I've been holding off writing this post. It is seemingly ridiculous for a thing I have had to convey by phone and text and email to feel any more or less real because it shows up on the blog, but somehow it does.
My mother died last week. It was also Mother's Day last week. And also my great aunt's 100th birthday, which thanks to some access to vaccinations, meant her kids were able to travel to be with her safely.
My mother did not want to be treated like a person who was sick, and so she carried on, happy to talk about books and other highly entertaining things that were not the boring details of being sick. It did mean that convincing her there was a deadly pandemic was a bit of a challenge. I was incredibly grateful that the state of Connecticut happened to be trying to engage in a decent number of sensible precautions, because it turns out being an adult child does not mean your parents have to listen to you the way they listen to other adults. (I know, this is a shocking turn of events.)
But yes, I have been telling folks for about a year that grieving in a pandemic is a challenge, and that continues to be true. I am lucky enough that I am considered fully vaccinated now, so travel is and will be possible for me, but not yet all the folks who loved her. It is also fortunate that live streaming and other virtual methodologies have become more common, so that I get to video chat with friends and relatives near and far, centenarians, and other lovely people.
I have been thinking a lot about this story of our trip to the wall. Mostly because I think it encapsulates some of the work my mother put into creating great experiences for those around her, even when the experiences did not quite live up to her dreams, she still worked to make the best of it.
