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| My Mom, maybe my favorite picture, 1995 |
Hi Mom,
When I started this YEAR IN NUMBER feature in which the number of the blog posts corresponds to a year of my life, I knew I would reach this year, the year you died on July Fourth 2015 at 10:10 a.m.
Other great things happened that year.
Liesel and I went to Scotland, and I actually taught an online class from Crieff, Scotland.
I played Ultimate as usual, attended a great wedding, did some great teaching, taught my last classes for the horrible ground campus of the University of Phoenix, which thankfully closed, even though it meant loss of income, and the D&D group I created was going strong.
In fact, since my best friend moved to Kalamazoo in 2014, I had plans to play D&D with him and his son the morning you died, Mom, which is why I was not at your side when you drew your last breath, which I suspect is why you did, knowing that both Lori and I were not coming out that Saturday morning, you knew it was time to go because you did not want to leave us when we were there with you.
This photo below. I did not include it in yesterday's post. It was from 2014 when we all went to the Kalamazoo County Fair, just before your hospital stay.
So far, in my life, losing you, Mom, has been the hardest thing I have ever coped with. It has been more difficult than recovering from prostate surgery, more painful than any breakup, more devastating than losing my favorite job with no good reason and being unemployed for the first time in my life, more than the death of our cats Mittens or Amber, more than that big fight with my sister the year you were in the hospital, more difficult and painful than watching you in your coma not sure if you would live.More difficult than all of those things.
Also, as life events goes, your death ranks in the top five along with getting married (#1), graduating from K-College (#2), your death (#3), finishing graduate school (#4), and having my prostate removed (#5).
For those who care about the whole top ten, and I am only including one relationship in it, my marriage, though previously I had included other relationships, here's the rest:
internship at Marvel Comics (#6), teaching Media and the Sexes, finishing the Star Trek novel (#8), meeting Margaret Atwood (#9), and winning the KUDL championship in 2010 (#10).
I have pictures and videos of you from after you died, as you were taken away to be cremated. I am not sharing those. In the five years since you died, I have only looked at those images one time.
Wow, reviewing 2015, I did a lot of things. It was a pretty significant year apart from your dying.
I miss you, Mom. I miss you every day. I carry you in my heart. I hear your voice all the time. Thank you for everything.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #179 - 2015, a year in review
I like what I wrote yesterday so much it bears repeating: "The felling of a tree is much like the felling of a year, cut off from the minutes of its last month--as we measure time--left to drift into the past, unmoored, floating free, cradling a flickering votive in the bark of its hours, creeping day-by-day ever closer to the horizon and the vanishing point. And yet, it never reaches that vanishing point, as in memory, it's all a matter of perspective."
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #179 - 2015, a year in review
Hi Mom,
I am choosing a date and time stamp even though I did not actually publish at that time. What really happened on Saturday January 2nd at 10:10 a.m. is this: I was driving home from breakfast with Chris Dilley when my eyes fixed on my car's clock at exactly 10:10 a.m., the time of your death. Like July 4th, this was the first Saturday of the month. I felt my eyes were drawn to the clock by you, Mom. I felt your spirit filling the car. I felt your reassurance that everything is going to be all right. In fact, I felt as if I could hear your voice: "everything's going to be all right, Christopher."
It seemed you were telling me to ensure that I reflect on you, Mom, your life, your love, my love for you, every day at 10:10 a.m. I have set my phone alarm to beep every day from now on at 10:10 a.m.
Thank you for visiting me, Mom.
As for the picture up top, I was working on previous blog entries yesterday because there were NINE unfinished ones. I knocked out all but one. I used the picture above in Hey Mom #62 to show the porch of our old Long Lake home now compared to then, using this 1971 picture from a summer vacation of us and the Holdemans. Its just the kind of photo of family that should sit a top this year in review, though I wish Dad was present in the photo more clearly. Since Dad is taking the photo, you can sort of see him in the reflection in the window with the light from the flash as his crown.
In many ways, 2015 was a significant year for me and my entire family, and not just because of your death, Mom. Many significant things happened. Indulge my time line.
2015 TOWER TIME LINE
January 2015 - I embark on what will be my first full calendar year as a student at WMU. I also start a new class at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor.
February 15, 2015 - I take Liesel to the ER with intense abdominal pain and the next day she has her gall bladder removed. Amazingly, just a few days later (1502.22), we have brunch with our friends Ryan and Mallory and wish them farewell as they return to South Korea for another teaching stint.
May 19-29th - Liesel and I toured Scotland, something I am still writing about on this blog with pictures and trip reports as I never finished a full travel journal as I wished. Upon arrival, we drove from Glasgow to the Isle or Skye, and we stayed in Uig, north of Portree, We lodged next in Crieff, the Gateway to the Highlands, and ended our stay in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
On June 20th, we all gathered at the Pattiwood condo for a combined Father's Day and Birthday celebration for Dad. You were not doing well at all, Mom, and the next day you started the active dying process. Though this may sound selfish, thank you for not starting this process until I got home from Scotland. I would never forgive myself if I had been in Scotland while you were dying.
On July 4th, Saturday, at 10:10 a.m., you died, Mom.
On July 10th, we shared a visitation in your honor and then Liesel, Ivan, and I attended the Erykah Badu concert at Miller - see Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #169 - The Erykah Badu story for more details.
On July 11th, Saturday, at 11 a.m., we held a Memorial Service for you, Mom, and interred your ashes in the garden at the Richland Presbyterian Church.
On August 27th, Dad and I went to the Turkeyville show Nunset Boulevard, our first without you.
On August 30th - September 1st, Dad and stayed at the Neahtawanta in Traverse City together.
On November 13th, Friday, Dad and I attended the Turkeyville Christmas show and the cast dedicated the performance to you, especially the sing-a-long that you loved so much.
In November, Liesel finished her Master of Science in Nursing degree.
we celebrated:
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #138 - Two for Liesel - Seven Songs - "Just Like Heaven" and "Veloruia"
In December, Liesel signed on offer with the Family Health Center to work as a Nurse Practitioner and will leave Bronson after ten years.
On December 25th, we celebrated our first Christmas without you, Mom.
And now, it's a new year. 2015 is over.
It's been a significant year, Mom. And it's a fifth year. I graduated from high school in 1980, five years later I graduated from K (1985), from years later I graduated from WMU (1990) (technically), and reunions happen every five years, and now on, another every five year event. Even your meningitis (2000) and your seizures (2005) happened on the fifth year.
Event-filled year, 2015.
- Days ago = 181 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1601.02 - 10:10
Dad and I went to the Abbott's Magic Get Together.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #33 - Abbott's Magic Get Together part one
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #34 - Abbott's Magic Get Together part two
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #35 - Abbott's Magic Get Together, part three
I went to two weddings, and at this one (Abby and BJ), I read from The Princess Bride. Such a good choice.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #36 - a wedding
I had the pleasure to play on one of the best teams in the history of KUDL and we almost made the finals!! We did win MOST SPIRITED team, but that's because of LITTLE...
We had an electric fan under the tent!!
We didn't win, but we had a great time, and there was a huge out pouring of love and support for me after your death, Mom.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #41 - KUDL TOURNAMENT 2015
I went to the opening day for Detroit Tigers Baseball at Comerica Park.
Reconnected with a good friend at the Kalamazoo County Fair.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #48 - Kalamazoo County Fair 2015
Dad and I went on vacation in Traverse City for the first time since I was a child. We used to live there.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #56 - Arrived in Traverse City
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #57 - Traverse City 2015 pt. one
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #58 - Traverse City 2015 pt. two
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #59 - Phonogram and Traverse City 2015 pt. three
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #62 - More on Traverse City pt. four
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #63 - our house - Traverse City pt. five
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #64 - whiskey time! Traverse City pt. six
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #65 - Ends and Odds - Traverse City part seven
Dad and I toured the AMERICAN MUSEUM OF MAGIC.
FALL SEMESTER BEGAN... After you died Mom, I tried to do a summer semester of Calculus and failed miserably I took a hardship withdrawal. I decided to re-take Pre-Calculus.
I never actually wrote anything in this one:
WHIRPOOL International hired me to do a technical writing seminar.
Dad and I went to a football game.
I rode my bike to school a lot.
Before you died, Liesel and I went to Scotland.
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| St. Mary's Church Grounds Dunvegan, Isle of Skye Scotland |
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| me, Dennis McKeen, Dad (Bob Tower) |
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #130 - Turkeyville Christmas Show
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| Me and Liesel, Skeabost Bridge, Isle of Skye Scotland, 1505.21 |
So, Mom, you loved music, and just before you got the meningitis, you loved singing in the church choir.
When you died, I needed music to help me heal.
Several days, I just drove around listening to the playlist I will share here singing in the car to help me heal.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #112 - Singing in the car
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #112 - Singing in the car
Music heals.
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| Mom - Choir - March 1999 |
MUSIC FOR 2015 - coping with grief
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #293 - Musical Monday - music for 1604.25
"Music “says” things about the world, but in specifically musical terms. Any attempt to reproduce these musical statements “in our own words” is necessarily doomed to failure. We cannot isolate the truth contained in a piece of music; for it is a beauty-truth and inseparable from its partner. The best we can do is to indicate in the most general terms the nature of the musical beauty-truth under consideration and to refer curious truth-seekers to the original."
- Huxley
Key quotes by Huxley shared in this Brain Pickings article linked next.
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| Mom - Choir robe - March 1999 |
Aldous Huxley on the Transcendent Power of Music and Why It Sings to Our Souls
"From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence.
"After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Huxley
"Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven’s or Mozart’s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner’s music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It “says” less because it is always speaking.
"Silence is an integral part of all good music. Compared with Beethoven’s or Mozart’s, the ceaseless torrent of Wagner’s music is very poor in silence. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it seems so much less significant than theirs. It “says” less because it is always speaking.
"In a different mode, or another plane of being, music is the equivalent of some of man’s most significant and most inexpressible experiences. By mysterious analogy it evokes in the mind of the listener, sometimes the phantom of these experiences, sometimes even the experiences themselves in their full force of life — it is a question of intensity; the phantom is dim, the reality, near and burning. Music may call up either; it is chance or providence which decides. The intermittences of the heart are subject to no known law.
"Listening to expressive music, we have, not of course the artist’s original experience (which is quite beyond us, for grapes do not grow on thistles), but the best experience in its kind of which our nature is capable — a better and completer experience than in fact we ever had before listening to the music." - Huxley
"Listening to expressive music, we have, not of course the artist’s original experience (which is quite beyond us, for grapes do not grow on thistles), but the best experience in its kind of which our nature is capable — a better and completer experience than in fact we ever had before listening to the music." - Huxley
SONGS FOR 2015
[1] Peter Gabriel - Washing of the Water
[2] EBTG - We walk the same line
[3] The Indigo Girls - The Wood Song
[4] Erykah Badu - Other Side Of The Game (LIVE)
[5] Beth Orton - Feel to Believe
[6] U2 - One
[7] David Bowie - Five years - [The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars]
[8] Sigur Rós - Glósóli [Official Music Video]
VARIOUS PHOTOS from 2015
CHRISTMAS 2015:
YOU IN YOUR CHAIR ON CHRISTMAS 2015:
SARAH ALLARD JENNINGS WEDDING
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #96 - Sarah's wedding
me and the Miah dancing
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Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you soon, Mom.
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- Days ago = 1879 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2008.24 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27 and 1907.04) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. Dropped "Talk to you tomorrow, Mom" in the sign off on 1907.04. Should have done it sooner as this feature is no longer daily.
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