Taking Apart our Mother's Life

Aloha - my brother (Paul) and I are in Coos Bay, Oregon this week. I am writing while in Sozo's Coffee Shop which is one of the very best coffee shops I have ever been in around the globe. Absolutely great food, good service, chic but homey and the barista's are excellent. I recommend enjoying yourself here if for some crazy reason you are passing through.

Our mum died August 21, 2010 - just a bit more than five months ago now. This is our first time back to her house since her death. We are beginning to take apart her life, cleaning out her memories, incorporating them into our own memories and re-remembering things we may have forgotten.

It is like taking this big chunk of data apart and the little bits of flotsam and jetsam that make up our lives drifts back into the data sphere. Some things to the dump and then to the landfill, some to Goodwill - the re-purposing of data, the bytes that make up our lives. We spend our whole life collecting this data, identifying with and making it 'us'. As our lives end, if we are lucky we get to shed this data stuff ourselves, to choose what we relieve ourselves of till death takes us. Then, entropy. Data dissolution speeds up and soon all that is left is memories held in others minds and the solid bytes of data are scattered to the winds.

For my mother one of the most tangible things are her paintings and stories. The stories are less solid in some way. It was difficult to throw away twenty copies of some of her stories into the recycle bin at the dump. We simply cannot keep that much data, that much physical manifestation of my mothers soul, of her life. We have her computer and I hope that much of it is on her hard drive. I rescued copies of her smaller stories but will I read them again? Will anyone? Does it matter?

But the paintings . . . they remain. Some will perish but others . . . and I hope the good ones will populate the landscape of the world for some time. I hope that I will run into some of them at some distant point in the future and remember my mother. We have the ones we want, a few of them good and many of them not very good at all. But they are her and we are all not so good at some things in our lives.

The sheer volume of 'stuff' is really amazing. We dig and dig and dig again. Layers of data of a life of 78 years and we still mourn and miss our mother.