The One About Life. And Death.

Dear Laney & Hagen,

A little over three years ago, I started this blog. This is my one thousandth post.

Not too long ago, Grandma Sue gave me a copy of a memoir called WILD by Cheryl Strayed. She described it as the story of a woman who had hit bottom and had decided to re-discover herself by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Because it's not polite to roll your eyes when you're given a gift, I said "thanks," and took it. See, southerners as a general rule aren't big on introspection. I'm sure it's unhealthy, but as a general rule, we don't set out to discover ourselves or probe our innermost feelings.* Our psychiatry offices are entered through a back door located off a dark alley. So the last thing I wanted to do was read a book about a navel-gazing woman who had a bad time and decided to take a long walk uphill.

But... because it takes 45 minutes to get to our house and your dad was driving, I got the book out and started to read it on the way home. The first chapters were about the abrupt death of the writer's mother to cancer. They were written with such heart and clarity and told a story of such profound loss that by the time I got to our exit off the interstate, I had gone into what Oprah would call my "ugly cry." I was seriously sobbing over the death of a woman I had never met, as told through the eyes of her daughter.

See, I had wrapped my head around the idea that one day my mother will pass away. And I will be inconsolable, and I will take to my bed, and my world will never be the same, but it will be part of the natural order of things. I understood death as a daughter, but I had never before thought about it as a mother.

I think I was crying all the way down Petty Creek Road because I realized that there will come a day when I won't be there for you. When I won't be able to make everything all better. And that idea was so devastating that I went into a sort of panic: What can I do RIGHT NOW so that when I'm gone, my children will know how much I loved them?!? And then my next thought - I swear - was:  I KNOW!! I should write them both a letter!!!

...and that's when I realized: I've written a thousand of them.

Every post on this blog has been a love letter to you both.

I hope you like them.

Love,
Mom

* I realize that as the author of a thousand-post blog, this is the height of hypocrisy. Let's move on.