Kindness and a Libation
Posted: January 16, 2022 Filed under: Musings | Tags: Appreciation, Caring, Death, dievca, elderly parents, Gifts, Joy, Life, Love, sadness, Thank you, time 1 Comment
A very large , “Thank You” for your kind words and glasses lifted up to honor a good Life.
The thoughts and presentations are so lovely. And dievca is working through her bottle over a long period as she replies to texts and phone calls. A little lubrication to celebrate a Life and ease the pain of kindness.
How are you all doing? What’s going on in your lives?
(dievca’s coming up for air~)
dievca 
A very belated expression of my sorrow for your loss. I lost my own mother almost exactly ten years before you did yours; like your mom, she lived to a truly remarkable age, and there’s a tendency, I think, fear even, for others — and sometimes even our own selves — to discount a passing at that age as somehow meriting a level and degree of grief more diminished than that felt for the death of a younger person. “Well, you had her with you for a good, long time, after all.” “She lived a wonderful, long life.” True enough and thankfully so, and certainly at 94 not an unexpected or unanticipated departure. But as I very quickly learned, one you’re never prepared for in the actual event. But just as truly, memory speaks, now softly, at times in a shout. And that’s something to be thankful for, as well. My mom was a modestly successful children’s writer in her time and now every visit to a bookstore (remember them?) necessarily involves a pass through the children’s shelves evoking times spread over long decades when she’d browse the hell out of every new title there while I impatiently waited, the latest Alan Furst or Michael Connolly already rung up, bagged and tucked under my arm. Or the obligatory trip to the bar at the old Ritz Carlton on Arlington St, always the last stop when I’d take her to her favorite restaurant a few blocks away. And always for a sidecar, a Molotov-cocktail of a cocktail if ever was, cognac and Cointreau in equal measure — to this day I have one on her birthday every year at what used to be the Ritz and marvel that she was able to walk unaided to the cab rank outside all those times past. And on and on. I hope — know — that you’ll do those things and have those thoughts forged from your own memory — and smile when you do so. As Faulkner famously put it (addressing another subject altogether) : “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” Be well. And I hope I haven’t intruded or over-reached in sending this.
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