Brought tears to my eyes…
Travel day today. Leaving shortly to fly back to California. I’ll try to answer or follow up on as many emails as I can along the way. There are hundreds of meaningful ones, including more condolances than I’m willing to count.
The memorial service for Mom was, of course, beautiful. I’ll miss her “turribly,” as she used to say. And love her bunches, as I still hear her saying.
What amazes me, in the retrospect I am now gaining on her life, is that she lived it completely both in the energy she put into every moment of it, and in the fact that she had done everything she had wanted with her ninety years.
So many lives end too soon with too much left undone; or linger far beyond the point when they cease being the complete person everybody remembers and wishes were either still here or mercifully gone. Mom’s life was like a symphony in three long movements that roughly corresponded to her roles as a young woman, a mother, and a grandmother. Last week she performed the finale of her third movement, closing with a sweet sustained chord.
How many of us will be blessed to live out a life like that? Or to be taught how to live by one of the good rare souls who does?
I’m glad the way Mom passed gave me even as painful as it was for her to struggle, almost successfully, to overcome the damage done to her body a chance to introduce the world to one of the best examples of a good life, well lived. If she had died any faster or slower, all this sharing might never have happened, simply because I would not have found the time. She made it for me, and for the rest of us.
At her memorial service I said Mom’s simple prairie philosophy was the one Garrison Keillor summarizes at the close of his daily Writer’s Almanac: Be well, do good work, and stay in touch.
Nobody did any of them better.
And now, as she so often said, it’s time to get back to work [Doc Searls Weblog]