Getting on with Life...And Blogging

I've taken quite a little hiatus from my fledgling blog.

Well, it was going really well. I was enjoying blogging, and people were reading it, which made it even more fun. I found I was able to keep up with posting regularly, although I had realized that blogging is also not completely easy. Especially when you really need to take decent pictures. Uh, I might not have mastered that part of things, but I was trying.

Then, I went on vacation. A much-needed and anticipated vacation to Europe. It was going really great. I was having fun, and I had scheduled blog posts so the blog did not stop. I was also going to supplement the prescheduled posts with some reports from the trip.

Until...I got an email that my mom might be sick. My brother was going to travel down to our hometown to see what was going on, since she was refusing to let people help her. As I checked emails by ducking into different Starbucks in Geneva for that 30 minute free wifi on my iPhone, I exchanged some anxious emails with my brother. Over the next couple of days of traveling through Switzerland, with only intermittent access to the Internet or phone, I found out as things unfolded that my mother had been taken to the hospital for dehydration, she actually had a mass in her lung, she probably had terminal lung cancer, and radiation was going to begin in order to keep catastrophic things from happening since a vein or aorta to the heart was getting blocked.

I had to suddenly book a flight for the following day (changing my reservation cost me $1300), fly to Philadelphia to get my car, and then travel to south Georgia to be with my mother. We started out thinking she might have a few months, but she went down fast. Just four days after I was able to get home, she passed away quietly. She had known who everyone was and had not been in any pain---my biggest fears based on witnessing other people's experiences.

If this horrible thing had to happen to my mother---and to my brother and me---then it was the best possible way it could have happened. Fast, quiet, painless, and dignified.

I am planning to resume blogging now.

I didn't have much access to the Internet, then when I was ready to travel back and start working again, I was too exhausted and stunned to have any interest in talking about nail polish. Or anything else.

I still don't think that I really have absorbed what happened in the last few weeks. I am still digesting the sudden acquaintance with funeral arrangements, probate, and arranging to clean out and sell the home I grew up in and still considered my real home.

I am still struggling to get caught up at work, compounded by our director leaving in October and leaving more work for everyone to do. I do really want, however, to get back to my little blogging attempt. Celebrating beauty and color through my nail polish obsession and handbag addiction just might be a good way to entertain and cheer myself up. I also want to expand and get into the travel-related writing I had originally wanted to include.

So I am getting on with life, however slowly and clumsily. As I resuscitate my blog, I hope my readers find their way back to me. And I hope I find my way back, too.