Quite a Couple of Weeks

I've been away for most of the last couple weeks, quite unexpectedly.  My brother, Mark, died suddenly a couple weeks ago and I went to northern California to be with my mother.  He was younger than I and most likely died of a heart attack or perhaps something related to his diabetes.  I don't think we will ever know.  I haven't begun to do my grieving.  There are now a slew of questions about what my mother will do and thinking about that with my sisters has shoved my grieving about my brother to the side.

My brother was a very good person but he had never quite gotten his life going.  I think much of my grieving is for a life largely unfulfilled.  He had many skills and talents but wasn't able to focus them into a career or even a consistent job.  I miss him.  I miss our talks, long conversations about politics on the phone.  He worked quite hard on Jerry McNerny's campaign in the neighboring Congressional District in 2006.   He was particularly interested in registering people to vote; stories about Republicans dumping voter registrations make him quite angry.  

He was also, like everyone else in our family, completely taken with our sister's daughter, Nadia, shown here about three years ago.  He doted on her and when I went down to help my mother clean out his room, we found several books and games that had to be very early Christmas or birthday gifts for her.
 
I've found from other deaths that there is nothing like it to make everything in my life come into clearer focus.  It's been no different this time.  Life has just seemed more poignant; my emotions are closer to the surface.  I'm sleeping more.  I've given up wearing eye makeup for the time-being; every time I go out something makes me cry and I come home with smudges under my eyes.

But of course the world has not stopped even if I have been too busy and too distracted to be writing about that.  I've got a back-log of things I want to write about and should get to now.  There are a couple of posts remaining from my trip to Netroots Nation in Pittsburgh, now a few weeks past, a belated Labor post, and more on Healthcare Reform.  For the next few days I'm resting in the spaciousness of my friend Barbara's house in the Okanogan.  The timing couldn't be better.  But I expect that I'm make it down to the local coffee shop once a day to get a post out.