Linnetontheleaf

I have just experienced a brief but serious medical scare (one of those heart-stopping calls in which they say they need to follow up on a little something they noticed in your routine screening), and am still weak with relief that the worries proved to be nothing.

As such things often do, it’s put the world back into clearer perspective for me, and I’m grateful for that.   Almost worth the days of anxiety to have this renewed discernment about what’s important and what’s not!

We’re off to Costa Rica next week, a different sort of vacation for our family — we usually go to Europe and look at churches and paintings, but we’re doing eco-tourism in CR, a complete switch.  Sloths and monkeys!  Coffee plantations and volcanoes!  The Pacific! 

All this and my health too — I’m a lucky woman, and lucky to KNOW it.

I last posted nearly six months ago to the day, which seems incredible, since it feels like a matter of only a few weeks. Frankly I have been in shellshock since that time. I sounded pretty insoucient on September 26, but the unremitting market turmoil gradually chipped away my candy coating, and now I’m melting down like all the other M&Ms in the bag.

I suffered a huge personal loss during this time too, the sudden death of my mother. Though 89, she was in good health and her death was abrupt and shocking. I am resigned on nearly every level — we had a long and wonderful relationship, and I’m so glad she did not suffer — but I think of her and miss her constantly.

Handling her estate and emptying her apartment in a distant city has consumed much of my energy over the past few months. It’s a process, I find, that you can move through numbly, almost disbelieving it’s happening! Such is the dissociative power of the grieving mind.