Keep It Up

My sister asked me if I was going to continue this blog now that our mother has been gone for over a year and I started this to deal with the emotions that consumed us as we cared for her and grieved our loss of her. It's a good question and one I thought a lot about over the past week, this past week when I sat next to a friend at a meeting and she told me of her sadness as her father suffered another setback in his cancer treatment. I thought about it again as a woman who works in the office next to mine stopped in to tell me how helpful the blog was to her as she lost her mother last month. And then there was Friday evening as I sat with friends I haven't seen for a long time and heard about a friend's sorrow over first his father's then his mother's dementia. Or the article another friend wrote about her grief and how she has survived that year of 'firsts' following her mother's death. There are more, it surrounds me.

I will continue the blog, I will continue to write about my mother, my family, my friends and any number of topics that strike me. As you can see, those of you who have been following for a while, I changed the look of the blog, brightened it a bit, changed it. That's what this is all about, isn't it? Change?

The grief, the love, the caring doesn't stop simply because time has passed. I miss my mother and know that there are many who miss their mother or father or grandmother or grandfather or others they loved. Grief is not fast or simple, it is long and complex and unlike all the other experiences we have in our lives, no one teaches us how to do it. Because of this we are left to find our own way through it and that is what I have tried to do here, find my way. In doing this I hope I have helped a few of you find yours, too.