For those of you who haven't seen me around in a while, I just wanted to chime in and offer an update to let everyone know I'm back and among the living again.

At 6:45pm on September 11, 2007, my mother passed away. As many of you may know, she had been unwell for quite some time and there have been more than a few medical emergencies and crises that have popped up, with little improvement over the years. Recently, she had fallen into a diabetic coma which doctors suspected was spurred on by a heart attack. A couple of weeks ago, I had to make the decision to take her off artificial life support and place her in hospice care. She was expected to pass within a couple of days but she held on for quite a while longer, even though she was completely unresponsive.

I got the news at work Tuesday night and rushed straight home, where Endo and I immediately started making arrangements to get ourselves to Indiana for the sake of making arrangments for her service and to tie up as many of her loose ends as we could. Once again, Darin proved himself to be my hero - I'm an only child of a single parent and as such, was completely on my own in all this. I would have just been a deer in headlights without Endo helping me through all the logistical insanity. Guardian angels are real.

We spent a week at a jankity - but very friendly! - Motel 6 near the Indianapolis Airport, and by the weekend we were joined by my dearest gal pal, the lovely Ms. Lilah Renay, and a truckful of Org goodness in the form of GangstaFam, Lothan and HeyBaby. They were all sweet enough to trek out to the wilds of Indiana for my mom's service, and they were just what I needed to give me a little vacation from all the grieving - we went out the night before the memorial and acted like fools for a while, which was exactly what I needed. It helped that we ended up in a truly weird pizza joint, complete with toy train drink service.

Mom's memorial service was small but also very nice. I was lucky enough to find the hospital chaplain who had visited with my mother not long before she died, and the chaplain agreed to officiate. She did a fantastic job - my mom would have been very pleased. Aside from my friends, some of my mom's former co-workers and close friends attended, and her brother/my uncle showed up and actually managed to make me laugh a few times. There had been a rift between my mom and her brother for many years, but in the past few months, they were able to patch everything up and become close again. It was good to see him back in the picture again, even if the circumstances were awful.

I was also pleasantly surprised to discover some really beautiful floral arrangements at the service, including a few that were courtesy of some very sweet people from the Org. Thank you very much Imago, CarrieMPLS, Violett and Katy (I always forget your Org name, but you know who ya are). This thoughtfulness helped to brighten up an otherwise truly awful day.

When I spoke with the chaplain about the structure of the memorial service, she suggested I open up the proceedings to let people speak and eulogize my mother. One thing my mother and I always had in common was a shared hatred of audience participation, so I warned the chaplain that she could open up the floor but please make sure people don't feel pressured to speak. I knew I wouldn't have the strength to say anything, and I didn't want anyone else feeling awkward or obligated to grieve in ways in which they weren't prepared.

I needn't have worried. One of my mother's good friends, who had been assisting her for years during Mom's ongoing illness, stood up and gave a very powerful speech about my mother's work for social justice, and the extents to which she put her career and life on the line for what she believed. I don't think many people present at the memorial were aware of this part of my mother's life, and I certainly have never known how to summarize such a huge, complex and surreal story. Shamefully, I didn't even know there was a summary about my mother available online.

For those of you who are interested in the work my mother did to fight institutionalized racism, click here:

http://www.prisonjustice....eport.html

For my part, I tried to bring a bit of my mom's essence to the memorial by way of music and pictures. The night mom died, I put together a CD of some of her favorite music - Beatles, Hendrix, Moody Blues, Prince, etc. - and while we were going through mom's apartment I sifted through years of photographs to find pictures of her I knew she liked, and other pictures that highlighted parts of her life that people may not have known. I put the pictures together in a memory book and displayed it on a table at the memorial. It was important to me that everyone got to see pictures of her as a young woman, decked out in her mod gear and playing drums in a rock band. I wanted people to see the picture of her from her second wedding, decked out in her wedding gown and posing with her friends with what may have been the biggest smile I've ever seen on her. The intensity of her happiness in that picture alone almost made her look like a stranger, but at the same time it looks more like my mother than any other picture I've come across. It's how I choose to remember her.

We spent the rest of our week in Indiana rifling through my mom's apartment, securing items I wanted to bring home with me and working with some really good people who knew my mother and were willing to empty out everything I didn't want. The person in charge of this good deed belongs to a church, and knew of a family who were in dire need of furniture and food. My mom's pantries were stuffed with dry goods and all kinds of spices, so I think those people are pretty well hooked up for a while. I know Mom would have approved.

Aside from some stuff of mine that my mom held for me over the years, I didn't want to take a lot. I've come into a minor mountain of photographs, including a huge box of photos that my uncle gave me from when my grandmother died last year. I gave away most of my mom's collections - her embarrassment of Barbies have been split up among her girlfriends, and what I called her "Scrooge McDuck mountain of jewelry" is still in the process of being sifted through and dispersed among people who will appreciate it. My mom had collected so much jewelry that even after half of it had been taken away, my friend Ms. Lilah spent an entire day digging through the remainder, separating it all into different piles.

The collection of my mom's that meant the most to me, and that which I took great care to set aside for myself, is her collection of Frank Zappa music and paraphernalia. Frank Zappa was to my mom as Prince is to me. She had every album ever released by Frank. And I mean EVERY. ALBUM. Even when she was ill and in bad spirits and really didn't even care about music, she HAD to have the latest offerings from Zappaland, ASAP. Even when she was in the hospital this summer, she had a Mothers of Invention poster I gave her tacked to the wall of her room. She had to walk with an IV stand during that time, and she named it "Frank".

Just a couple of weeks before my mother went into the coma that took her life, she had only recently been released from the hospital for a series of heart attacks and was ordered to stay in bed until advised otherwise. Not even a week had passed before my mother decided to sneak out of her apartment and run downtown to buy tickets for "Zappa Plays Zappa", a night of Dweezil playing the music of his father, Frank. And by god, she dragged what was left of her tired, dying self to the Murat Auditorium the next day and watched Dweezil playing guitar live in front of video footage of Frank, then she bought some t-shirts, came home, and bragged on the phone to me about it the next day. I didn't have the heart to yell at her about it - I kinda knew it's something she had to do.

Famming out runs in the family.

It's hard to talk about my mom without writing a novel, so I'm surprised I can stop here. There's so much more. My mom was a million people rolled into one body, and I don't think there was strength enough in that shell to hold all the people inside. She was a lot of things: a mother, a businesswoman, a teen journalist, a rock musician, a mod scenester, an activist, a collector, an administrator, a costumer, a floral arranger, and she wore about a kajillion other hats during her 56 short years of life that I'm sure I'm completely forgetting. One week she'd be obsessed with learning Tai Chi and the next week she'd be ordering me to draw Alice in Wonderland posters for a MADD benefit she was doing event planning for. Projects always came from left field with my mom, and I learned to just hold on tight and enjoy the ride. It was always interesting.

That woman, who was so ridiculously full of inspiration and creativity, died long before her body gave out. It was sad to see my mother falling into an obsession with her own illness over the past decade, because the bottomless cup of inspiration seemed to finally hit the wall. But even at the darkest moments, there were always little glints of her right-brained insanity that would peek through now and again, and I always tried to encourage those glimmers of creativity and get her mind off all the medications and blood tests and hospital stays.

I'm not really sure what the process is going to be like for me now. I have to deal with the death of my mother at the same time as I'm getting adjusted to a new home in a new city and a new job. That's a lot of newness to process, good and bad. But to bring this little missive full circle, I've been FAR away from the Org and all things Intraweb over the past week or so, and I just wanted everyone to know I'm back, I'm putting on my Org mod hat and checking out front page news submissions again, and I'm hoping things will get back to business as usual (whatever that is) ASAP.

Thanks to everyone who sent me kind messages over the past week, and I'm sorry I haven't responded sooner. And I'm also sorry I didn't send out any messages or threads as all this happened - I just wasn't in the headspace for it, and I knew I couldn't respond to any comments until I was home and had time to process things in my surroundings.

So anyway - did I miss anything while I was gone?

I'm very, very sorry to hear about your mother. May she rest in peace.

Thankyou for sharing Mom with us.

so sorry for your loss

Beautiful post, Chris.

And welcome back home.

What a wonderful life she led full of human compassion.

And, what a fortunate man you are to have the friends that you do.

I'm so sorry to hear of your loss. May she rest in peace

Thanks for posting and sharing her with us.

You've been on my mind.

All the best in your future, anx.

why does God need all the mommas right now?




thanks for sharing....

truly sorry to hear about your mom...

i'm glad your back

you have some wonderful friends from the org

So sorry to hear about your mom.

May she rest in peace.

All the best to you and your close ones.

Her biggest achievement, surpassing all the others, was having such an incredible son. Your tribute has me crying amid a sea of (thankfully) oblivious co-workers. Just beautiful.

And my heart is with you while you heal. I am so touched by the orgpeople who sent their love, as well.

Very sorry to hear about your mother. She sounds like a phenomenal woman!

What a great tribute to you Mom Chris,thanks for sharing.And I agree with Insatiable, the apple didn't fall too far from the tree..

Sorry for your loss Chris

Thank you for giving us all a little insight to her.

Love to you and Darin, am pleased he has been your rock. I would expect nothing less of him.

Thanks for sharing this Chris. What a beautiful person she was in her life. As always, words falter when expressing my sympathies in these situations, but I hope you know how I feel despite. Just know there are those of us who genuinely care. May she rest in peace.

Sorry for ur lost Anx

R.I.P

hug: I love you and thank you for sharing her!

you are pretty much amazing. and now i know why
thank you so much for sharing that with us.

i love that she went to the concert. kismet

i wish you and darin much love, understanding and peace

I know what you are going through, I went through this 10 years ago.
May god bless you, and hold you tight... the pain never goes away, but in time you learn to go on to honor your Mom's memory.

I am so sorry to hear of your loss. And so glad your mum seems to have had a rich life, such a great son and that you have such great friends to help you through this.

Much strength to you, as now the grieving starts only now... I do not know you well, Chris, so I do not know what kind of person you are and how you deal with grief, but don't hold back when you feel it knocking.