My father David is eighty years old today. He was born in a rather nice little house in Mississippi--once he told me that he was born in a barn, but that was just one of his leg-pullings. My youngest called him up today and said, "Grandpa, you're eighty!
How do you feel?" My dad replied, "I felt a lot better yesterday, when I was still seventy-nine!" May you live to be a hundred, Dad. He choked up on the phone today about my sister, but he also sounded okay, too. He's got just a few lines in my book, but I think they capture his sense of humor, even in one particularly awful situation.
I went to grief counseling at the local hospice caring project and spent fifty minutes crying in front of a very nice grief counselor. Guess I am moving out of the "numbness" stage over my sister's death. I strongly recommend grief counseling if that is something anyone out there in Readerland needs. You can say pretty darn much anything about the person who has died and the situation, from positive things to stuff you need to vent about, and a good counselor will have HEARD IT ALL and more.
My sister was a tremendous help to me in all phases of The Strega's Story and I was so glad that, in Boston, I was able to read the opening chapter to her (she'd read a lot of it, but had not heard a lot in finished form). Eerily, and extremely sadly for me, I hold a lot of the family stories now--we talked and talked and talked of them in the course of this book--the same way my mother and grandmother discussed them endlessly--
and now I will not forget them...and in fact have to write a few more down that didn't make it into the book...
Thank you, cherished readers, for being patient with me in one of the most awful times of loss I have ever experienced. Eventually, good things will come from this, even if just a tempering of my spirit.
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