There’s no new news from Richmond; the last time I spoke to my brother, he said that Mom was breathing about 4 times a minute, and the hospice nurse said it should be “soon”.
I’m glad my brother’s keeping me in the loop, even if I jump every time the phone rings. It was especially unnerving when I picked up the phone after working out this morning — the display said “1 new voicemail”, and I couldn’t bring myself to play it until I got home from the JCC. As it happened, the call was from the Rabbi, letting me know she’d be available this morning if I wanted to stop by the shul, but….
She lent me a couple of books: Anita Diamant’s Saying Kaddish and Anne Brener’s Mourning and Mitzvah. I haven’t looked at them yet, but I expect I’ll be doing so on the plane back to Richmond, whenever that is.
In the meantime, I came into the office this afternoon; we were having a departmental Tech Talk that I wanted to hear, and I decided I could wait here as easily as at home. But I think I’ll leave early. There’s a huge pile of mail at home (I’ve been travelling since the beginning of April), and I’m not really doing a lot for IBM at the moment.
I found The Lord Is My Shepherd : Healing Wisdom of the Twenty-third Psalm by Harold S. Kushner vaguely comforting, though I don’t actually recall when I read it, I knew I read it around the time I knew what was going to happen next.
My sympathies & condolences…
Thanks. Shir Hadash did a five-book Kushner seminar a couple of years ago, but we didn’t read that book then. Perhaps it’s time.