Hi – I've been gone from my blog ever since I posted for Mother's Day. There have been lots of reasons – loads of company, illness, lack of inspiration – all the usual excuses. And I wish I could promise I'll do better, but I'm not sure about that. We can only hope.
My last post was about my mother's death in 1995 on Mother's Day. On August 1, 1998, three years later, my father died, exactly three weeks after Les and I celebrated our fiftieth wedding anniversary with Dad right there with all of us and exactly one week after I had major abdominal surgery. I wrote about his sudden death previously.
Eight weeks later I was on a book tour in Oregon and on the morning of my sixty-eighth birthday, I walked along the beach, cried, hurried back to the hotel. and wrote:
A Birthday Mourning
A birthday morning—
an ocean shore, far from home
whitecaps blend into the mist above
driftwood lies gray upon the sand
relics of places distant, days of yore
A birthday morning—
my first as an orphan
the woman who bore me
gone three years and more
the man who sired me, ashes encrypted
A birthday mourning—
for the two who gave me life
and where am I
under this threatening sky?
Who am I
and when
shall I die?
(Excerpted from The Last Violet, copyright 2002 Lois Tschetter Hjelmstad)
Are you an adult orphan?
When did your second parent die?
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