It's Been Almost a Year...

since my darling mother passed away. I was off for the entire week of Thanksgiving, so my family and I spent two full days working at Mother's house. We packed up a lot of boxes and sent them to our storage building. We packed up most of Mother's artwork in plastic, and sent those packages to the storage building. The storage building is climate-controlled, so the pictures will be safe until we can look through them and see what we want and what we want to share with other people. I've had several cousins tell me that if there's anything we don't want, they'd love to have samples of Mother's work to hang in their houses.

I found Daddy's stash of office supplies, and packed most of those up to bring to my house. We found file folders, file folder labels, and copy paper. We--my sister, my niece, and I--laughed as we uncovered all these treasures; we share the office supply gene, which helps to justify MY stash of pens, markers, scrapbook paper, card-making supplies, sheet protectors, stickers...you get the idea. We are all regular customers at office supply stores; Daddy's favorite Christmas gifts were gift cards from Office Max. If he'd been born sooner, he'd have mastered a computer. As it was, he just had a collection of typewriters--different sizes of type (Pica or Elite) and different sizes of carriages--both manual and electric.

I had my immediate family with me for Thanksgiving, and in spite of the losses I've had during the past year, I still have much for which to be thankful. There are so many people who are much worse off than I, and who never had the happy marriage that I had. I hope I can hold onto that thought as Christmas approaches...

Grey's Anatomy vs. My Real Life

I became a Grey's Anatomy fan over the summer. I had to force myself to stay at home and adjust to life without my husband, so I made a weekly trip to Blockbuster (in addition to my Netflix subscription) and watched a LOT of DVDs. I ended up buying last season as soon as it was released so I'd be caught up when the new shows started.

Tonight's episode had a storyline about a man whose wife was critically ill. I won't replay the story here, but she ended up dying during surgery. The only person who sat with the man during the procedure was an intern. There were no family members, no friends, no one except one of the show's major characters. I may have missed some details (I was working on a project while watching the show, so my whole focus was not on the television), but I cannot imagine going through a crisis like this without my support network.

I sat at the hospital from a Thursday evening (5:00 or so) until early the following Saturday morning (5:00 a.m.), and I was never alone. In fact, during the day on Friday, more than fifty people stopped by the hospital to show their love and respect for my husband and me, and to pray with me. One of those people was my husband's ex-wife; I wanted her to be there to be with their sons. I hope I never take my friends and family for granted.