Tuesday, May 3, 11:55 p.m.

All through this week the email from David I posted last week reverberates in my mind. He was so upbeat, so understatedly funny. Implying that his older sister was adopted because her bone marrow didn’t match his. There was a lot of hard living to go through the next two years. And now, of course, he’s dead.
It’s ten p.m. Tuesday night and I am committed to posting before midnight. Unlike some other weeks, where I start a draft post early in the week, I am starting from scratch right now. The reason is obvious, has been obvious to me for weeks. The week of April 30 to May 6, 2014 was the start of one of the darkest, most painful months of the whole leukemia experience. I just haven’t been able to go back and read and organize the various accounts I have scattered among my Word documents.
I want to process them and write about them, but that hasn’t happened yet this week.

Just today Jaye, our grief counselor at Good Shepherd Hospice, forwarded to me a grief newsletter on the theme of Mothers’ Day and bereavement. One of the articles, on bereaved mothers, made me cry. And I was stunned to realize that although I had thought many times about Mothers’ Day in the past few weeks, NOT ONCE had it occurred to me that this year would be the first one since David had died. Talk about denial. But, since Jaye sent me the newsletter my conscious mind is on notice: May 8, 2016 may be (like 99.99% probability) a difficult day to get through.