missing you

I miss you guys! Hope all is well with you. I'm just hanging out over here, being a couch potato for the most part. Getting very little done these days, my back hurts all day, every day. OUCH. Physical Therapy has not helped - and possibly made it worse (I have curvature issues) ARGH - my PT is having me take two weeks off and then we'll review. My spine doctor has begun to mutter the possibility of surgery to me. No no no! WAH. 

March 10th was five years since my Dad passed away. Grief and loss are such strange and somewhat indescribable things. I feel as though I've been walking through a fog ... slowly, feeling my way, waiting for the mist to clear. The sun breaks through more often now but there will always be an ache and a longing. 

My cousin emailed me this week that she and her sister were going to have a hospice evaluation for their mom this week. I just wept, reading her email. Aunt Emily is the last of our parents, the last who will love us unconditionally and the last keeper of our collective family memories. We are a small family and a family that was never close. I have struggled since my dad passed away, to make connections where there were none.

(my mom, gone nearly 20 years now, is in the middle of the photo and my aunt Emily is the one on the right end)

My brother has been gone more than 20 years now. We feel his presence in his daughters and now his grandson, who bears a bit of a resemblance to him and that warms our hearts and lifts our spirits. We are all connected, part of a continuum.

This week I had an overwhelming sense that I should google a friend of mine who I hadn't heard from the past few years. Linda and I had been friends in the early 80's. We had met at a needlework store we both frequented (a lot!) and became friends, bonding when both of our marriages were falling apart and ending. Our lives would no longer intersect after a few years but we would sometimes speak on the phone and then later send news in Christmas cards. 

Yes, I did google and I found online that her (next) husband (of 25 years) had passed away in late 2014, from an inoperable prostate cancer that spread.

I had worried I had offended her somehow or that she no longer liked me but as is more-often-than -not the case, her silence had nothing to do with me, at all. 

Knowing her, I know she dug in with everything she had, to love and attend to her husband, every moment of every day. They had always been as though they were one, one heart one mind one being. Theirs lives were each other and rarely extended beyond the two of them.

Good gosh, I've probably depressed three quarters of you reading this (if anyone still is!!!) LOL! Sorry! Just a lot of emotional events for me in the space of a few days and I had the need to blabber on ... and on ... and on ...

Now would be a great time to give all those you love a hug and a squeeze! Just sayin'.

And on a much lighter topic ... I'm mulling over a crafty project! Been a long time ... 

Much love to you my bloggy friends, take care, be well!