Continuing

My mom passed away last night. That euphemism seems just right for what happened: after the ventilator tube was removed from her throat, she peacefully slipped away. My sister, brother, and I were with her, holding her hands, comforting her, and reading to her.

(I wrote a tribute to my mom on Mother's Day, May 14, 2006, if you want to read about my remarkable mom. Just use the blog archives)

I often wonder how people go on after a loss like this. This is how I keep going on: I think about my parents, about my mom, how she would have wanted it this way. I try not to think about a world without my mom.

Stacey, a black belt at our school suffered a terrible loss last spring. Her brother became suddenly ill and died. Stacey is younger than I am, and her brother wasn't old, either. I wondered how someone might bear such a loss. But she did, and she came back to Tae Kwon Do (she's been gone recently because of travelling for a job).

I want this blog to be about my Tae Kwon Do journey, not about my life in general, but there are some things that are so huge, they affect everything.

Though much else is filling my life in these past few days, I still think about TKD, and about how it will be to get back and begin doing martial arts again.