As with my father, I was asked to deliver the eulogy for my mother’s funeral. What follows is the text from which I worked last Saturday. I can’t promise that this is exactly what I said, but it gives the reader the general impression. And if you’re just catching up because Meta has failed spectacularly in the duty it assigned itself to be the principle medium of the communications of life events: My mother, Evelyn Briggs Wilson, born Elizabeth Evelyn Briggs on December 7, 1926, died on August 25 of this year. Her obituary related the facts of her life. And now for a more personal perspective:

Do you ever lie awake at night,

Just between the dark and the morning light,

Searching for the things you used to know,

Looking for the place where the lost things go?

Memories you’ve shared, gone for good you feared,

They’re all around you still, though they’ve disappeared.

Nothing’s really left or lost without a trace.

Nothing’s gone forever, only out of place.

Those words aren’t mine. They were written by a man named Scott Wittman for the Walt Disney film Mary Poppins Returns. It’s sung to children who have lost their mother. We saw that movie on Christmas Day in 2018, on one of our last Christmas trips to Rehoboth Beach, one of my mother’s favorite places.

The memories we’ve shared are all around us right now. Dementia changes people, but some prominent traits were with her to the end: her concern that everyone was getting fed, and that everyone had a bed to sleep in; her insistence that all the bills be paid on time–she was sure to the bitter end that she owed someone eight hundred dollars, and that her taxes were late. I never told her that the Maryland Comptroller had mistakenly sent her to collections this Spring for a tax bill she didn’t owe.

Meta, via Facebook, has taken the place of the newspaper in society. In the pre-Internet days, newspapers did significantly more than report on foreign wars and partisan multi-generation duels. Newspapers were the backbone of our social network. From the newspapers we learned which old classmates had died, who was getting married, who was holding a picnic, what the local schools were up to. Newspapers were critical to our engagement in the community.

Then came social media, and, let’s face it, to most of the American public, that means Facebook. Those who once relied on newspapers moved to this new technology for sharing community news. Newspapers required days of lead time and were not free. Facebook made it painless to announce meetings, deaths, births and marriages, and even to request help in crisis. Papers lost this folksy market, and, predictably, people also stopped subscribing.

I keep my political life relatively quiet here. I don’t necessarily keep my opinions about issues quiet, but I haven’t talked much about my day-to-day political activities. I have friends across the political spectrum, and I mostly don’t want to drive wedges based on labels.

So many of you may not even realize that, for the past four years, I have been an officer of the Howard County Republican Party, and, for two of those years, its Chairman. 

A few weeks ago I resigned from the Republican Central Committee, with apologies to the over 4,000 voters who put me there. I could not do what they elected me to do. The committee and I, indeed, were just in each others’ way. 

But my conscience forced me to share with the voters—all the voters—my concerns about the state of politics and government in Howard County, Maryland and the U.S. I wrote a brief Op Ed for the Baltimore Sun, and that led me to be interviewed by the insightful Claudia Barber, Esquire for her Being Well Informed podcast. I wanted to give everyone a chance to read and hear what I said. My most-used social media platform, no doubt trying to improve user experience by sheltering users from hearing things that would make them think, seems to have kept my post about this off of most people’s feeds. So here it is again.

A lot of people are already angry, and no doubt more will be when they hear what I have to say. But some, like Claudia, might be pleasantly shocked at this Republican’s words. Please keep your minds open. Of course, if you’re a friend of mine, I know you’ll do that anyway.

The headline is the important thing here. Inverted pyramid style, I put the most important fact even above the lede. That Kirby is home is the most important piece of news I have to share this week. And then I can tell you how she almost didn’t come home.

Kirby is my family’s dog, a shepherd/husky mix. She has a drinking problem, but only with water. She has a bad habit of silently creeping from the room where the family is and slinking upstairs to see if anyone left a toilet lid up, so she can binge. Barring that oversight by a human family member, she pulls up the bathmat in the tub and licks from it Every. Drop. of Water. She loves peanut butter and ice cubes. She will stare fixedly at you if you eat in front of her. If she slips her leash, she approaches escape velocity and quickly leaves the zip code. She pulls hard on the leash, because, if you come from Siberia, everything and everyone looks like a sled. She has barked less than a dozen times in her life–about once a year. She talks frequently, especially if she believes it’s time for peanut butter and none has been delivered. (If you have never heard “husky speak,” visit YouTube and search the term. It’s enlightening.) More than one friend has referred to her as a “therapy dog,” because he very presence relieves tension and anxiety.

Sunday, WBFF TV / Fox45 showed up to do a smear piece. We were selling porn to children in the dealer’s room!

“Ethel, they’s pitchers o’ Cap’n Kirk an’ Doctor Spock in ther, and they’z nekkid as jaybirds n’ touchin’ each others’ doodads!”

Oh. The humanity.

July 7, 2021

Dear Jessica —

Yesterday marked thirty days. 

Thirty days since we last looked on your beautiful face.

Thirty days since we watched you draw your last breath. 

Thirty days since we were able to hold out a shred of hope that life might go back to being what we expected it to be.  

I can’t speak for everyone, but I still just can’t believe you’re gone. Your stuff is still everywhere. Your name is still on mail and packages that come to the house. Your account pops up when we watch TV. Your reading room—“the shecava”—still smells like a gentle herbal tea. Goodreads still shows the books you’re working on finishing. Your pens and coloring book are still waiting to be used. Your study guide for working at the Aquarium is still on the shelf, waiting for you to make more notes. 

Milo’s meow has gotten louder, as he checks each room to see if, maybe, you were there all the time and he just didn’t notice. 

We’re in no hurry to change any of that. Except maybe the volume on the meows. If you can’t be with us, it helps to be reminded that you were. As the old woman says at the end of “Ever After,” if you and Ethan did or did not live happily ever after, the most important thing is that you lived. 

Still, for thirty days, we’ve missed you and wished that time would just reset, or that we’d go to sleep and wake to learn it was an actual nightmare, not a nightmarish reality. This nightmare started twenty days before you died, when we were told the cancer was in your lungs. Until that moment, we truly believed you were beating it, and had nowhere to go but up. From that day, things just cascaded downward.

I’ve been posting pictures of you, or things related to you, every day since you left us. I want people to know who you are, why you were perfect as a member of our family, and why the world is better off because you spent 25 years and just under six months as one of its inhabitants. I hope you don’t mind. Although you blogged and didn’t flinch at telling a room full of authors it was time to stand up, shut up, and let someone else have the room, you could be shy. I hope you wouldn’t think I’m drawing too much attention your way. It’s just that I think there’s not enough admiration in all the world to give you your due. I’m known as a pretty cynical, pessimistic person (by those who think they know me and really don’t), but, dammit, when I’m proud of someone, when I love someone, I want everyone to know it. 

I wish I could tell you everyone here was okay. Truth is none of us really are. But we keep going in the knowledge that you would keep going, if you could. And I imagine you would want us to keep going until it’s well and truly time for us to journey to wherever you are, and see you again. 

Ethan firmly believes you’re still with him, watching over him. I’m glad. I believe that too. If you have any power to reach out and help him, I know you will. And you know we’ll do our part too. Thank you for loving our son so well. From the moment the two of you met, I could see in your eyes how you both felt. That’s one of the most precious things a parent can ask, to see that love in someone else’s eyes for the person they love so much. I always saw it in yours for him, and his for you. 

Other than that, all I can saw is that this sucks. We miss you. I hope you know that, and can somehow see us. And I hope you’re not hurt or scared anymore.

Love,

—Steve

PS: I’ll follow this up in the coming days with a collection of the photos I’ve been posting. Some of your friends, young and old, just don’t do the social media.