Death rears its head

My mother died in the wee hours of January 15, 2008. Everything she thought was important is not important any longer. Her joys and her sorrows no longer matter. Her choices were how she chose to spend her life. One can only wish that she had chosen to forget, to realize that "this, too, shall pass," to choose happy things rather than to try to make everybody pay for not living according to her dictates. And I mean EVERYBODY, not just family. She would even judge entertainers on TV shows. She mentioned once when Jack Benny died that it was too bad he was going to hell because he was not Christian. She was an excellent mother, one that modern mothers should emulate. She was a crappy friend to me as an adult, no friend at all. An abusive person. She spent her entire life that I know about trying to make yesterday better, hoarding unpleasant facts about everyone to be sure that she would remember what they have to pay for in their lives and to make sure she would make them pay. She was beautiful, but she made herself unattractive by her joy in playing the victim. There was no winning with her; in one of her last letters to me last year, she whined about when I joined the Army and my husband came to stay with her a while, how he was intolerable. I wrote back saying that it was a relief that finally somebody saw it from my point of view, what I had to put up with in later years of the marriage. She promptly wrote me back saying I was the most awful person and that my husband could do no wrong. Go figure.

Even though I had not seen her in 20 years, I still miss her. Some things perpetually belong in your life, y'know?

Knowing from first-hand observation that whatever is in your mind and heart ultimately does not matter, it behooves us to give ourselves and others the most pleasant lives we can have, to respect each other, to overlook each other and look forward to the new day every day. Our memories are the only things we can take with us when we cease to exist, so we might as well make them good ones.