Yesterday I took three kids--Walter, Frances, and Rutledge to Annapolis, Maryland for my Uncle Bill's memorial service. I am still questioning exactly what I was thinking taking them along, since it was not an environment where they would be on their best and quietest behavior, but Kerry had to take Ollie to diving practice, which most certainly isn't a good place for accompanying sibling, and I feel strongly that it is a priority to give my children some sense of extended family, since they have fairly little of that now. They had never met my Uncle Bill, so the service was a bit boring to them.  But they were also able to meet their cousin, Quin, for the first time.  And I want them to have some chances to see the people they are related to as real people, not just lines on a family tree (not that I'm that organized at this point to have made a real family tree...).  

My heart goes out so much to my cousin, Lisa.  She has lost her father after a long, long illness that took his abilities away from him bit by bit.  And her mother had a stroke last year and requires a great deal of care.  There's not enough you can say about the gift she has given her parents by taking care of them, living with them while they need her help, and her family's dedication to each other in sickness and in health.  I ache for her because I've been through my own time of amazing pain with my mother and her death and the massive crater that has been left in my life because she is gone.  During the terrible, awful, unbelievable week when she was dying, lying semi-conscious in the hospital, the whole scene was surreal.  It felt like it was never going to end, like it was the longest week ever, and like she was always going to be held in that space between living and dying.  And yet, I can firmly say that six years later, she is definitely gone.  She's not coming back.  I don't have her with me, even in a terrible state that is nothing like she was during the time that she was living and was the mother I knew.  It feels so crazy and so wrong not to have a mother who is there to be with my children, with her grandchildren, to be someone that they know, that they do things with, who is part of their life and their childhood and their history.  Instead, at best, my children remember her as an old lady in a nursing home, and at worst...they don't remember her at all.  Worse yet, one of them never even met her.  It feels, on my feeling sorriest for myself days, that its simply unfair, that there is nothing that can ever take her place and nothing that can ever fill the role that a grandma should be filling for them, and this is a gap in their life that is just wrong, wrong, wrong.  And so I feel all the more acutely sympathy for Lisa, because her little boy is just three years old, mere weeks older than Rutledge, and I know how she wants him to know and love the parents that she knew and loved, not just live through their illnesses, the hardships of the last part of their lives, the chaos that comes with a house full of nurses coming and going, medical equipment, distressing doctor visits, excruciating decisions that you never asked to have to make.  We can tell our children the stories of our parents, of our childhood, of the people that we knew them to be, but the sad fact is, we can't really make our kids know the people that meant everything to us.  I feel like my mother is as much myth as anything else to Walter, Ollie, and Frances (Rutledge can't even comprehend yet).  About as unreachable as anyone else who might appear on our family tree from the past.  The experience of losing a parent certainly is part of what has made me reassess what I want to do to bring my own family closer, to be sure that we live to the fullest together, that we have plenty of time before they inevitably grow up and move on to their own families.  Because in the end, it is, for sure, these families that we have now, our young families, that provide what healing there is out there for the giant hole that the loss of a parent causes.  And I suspect it will be, eventually, that way for my cousin as well.  There's nothing like a preschooler, with mischievous antics, little illnesses, broken bones, parties to send snacks for, Halloween costumes to pull together at the last minute, violence on the playground, and the zillions of things that we worry about with our children to force you to live in the here and now.  It doesn't really make things better, but it does take your mind off of it, and eventually, it makes you focus on what you can do with the people in your life who are still here, because you'll never be naive enough again to think that however it is, that it's going to be this way forever.