05.26.19

How do you share your bad news?

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:41 pm by ducky

My mother died. It wasn’t a big surprise — she had had cancer for three years, and was not having a good time.

I am discovering that I am human: I burst into tears somewhat unpredictably, I find myself regularly thinking, “Oh, I should tell Mom about… oh wait, no I can’t.” I had heard people talk about those effects, so I know those would happen.

But nobody told me how to break the news. If there is a convention in our culture for how to break the news, well, I must have been sick the day we covered that material.

It was straightforward to notify her friends. I phoned them and told them. It was right and appropriate and the mere fact that I phoned them was an indication that something was wrong. It was sometimes hard for me to get the words out, but her friends understood, in part because they also were grieving.

Telling strangers was slightly harder than telling her friends. Sometimes I had to tell a company, e.g. ones Mom was a customer of. If the company was big enough that they had a branch dedicated to closing accounts for deceased people, it wasn’t so bad, but for smaller companies, sometimes the person on the other end would not be emotionally prepared, and it would remind them of some loss of theirs and set them off, which would set me off.

(There was exactly one company, her newspaper, which was insensitive. The agent kept very aggressively trying to get me to take over her subscription even though I don’t live in Mom’s town.)

But nobody prepared me for the angst of how to tell my friends and acquaintances, especially those who lived in other cities. Send them an email with the subject line, “Mom died”? Send a chatty email about the weather and say, “oh, by the way, Mom died yesterday”? Or do I wait and say, “oh, by the way, Mom died last month”? Or should I wait until I see them in person, which might be a year or two from now? Or do I just not tell them — ever?

For people I run into who I know and like but am not super close to, a simple “How’s it going?” makes my brain freeze for a minute. Do I just give the pro forma “fine?”. Do I blurt out “my mom died”? Do I wait for an appropriate place in the conversation? Is there an appropriate place? Am I going to burst into tears or am I going to be able to maintain composure?

I thus have been completely bumbling along and inconsistent. Some people I have told unbidden. Some people I’ve told when asked how I was. Some people I just… haven’t told… yet. I tell myself I’m doing the best I can, but I know I am lying to myself. I don’t even have the foggiest idea what “best” looks like.

So I’m blogging this. Perhaps this will catch some of the people I haven’t told yet.

05.18.19

My mother RIP

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:01 pm by ducky

My mother, Judith Newlin Sherwood passed away, April 26, 2019 in her home in Bellingham, Washington. She was 80 years old. Memorial services will be held at 3PM on Friday May 24, 2019 at the Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship in Bellingham, WA. She is survived by her sister Joyce, brother Joe, her three children — Anton, Tim, and me — and her former husband Bruce.

Mom was born in 1939 to Mildred and Jason Newlin in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her childhood was spent in Carmel, Indiana,  just north of Indianapolis, close to relatives and the wonderful fields and farms of (then-rural) central Indiana. When she was twelve, her family moved to West Lafayette, Indiana.  She met Bruce Sherwood at West Lafayette High School and married him in 1959, after their junior year in college.  During their senior year, they were they first married couple to appear on College Bowl, and on the first team to win four games in a row.

She completed her preparatory education and life in central Indiana in 1960 when she graduated from Purdue University.

She and Dad then spent a year in Padova, Italy after they graduated, where my brother Anton was born.  They then finished their educations at the University of Chicago, where  Mom earned a masters in Statistics.  They then spent three years in Pasadena, CA.

In 1969, Mom and Dad, now with three children, moved to Champaign, Illinois. They both established careers there that supported education delivery in a distinctly technological and novel way at the PLATO project at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. During most of my childhood, Mom worked as an on-line “consultant”, helping novice programmers debug their programs.

Having raised a family, acquiring invaluable experience and skills in a quietly major technologically innovative project, Mom’s life changed focus to a different type of spiritual growth. She moved from Champaign in 1984, to Pittsburgh, PA, to Mt. View, California and finally to Bellingham. She formally retired in California in 2002 with nearly 35 years of experience in computing technology.

In 2004, Mom made Bellingham, WA her home, joining the community taking and taking a seat at a few tables. Her hobbies included quilting and duplicate bridge, and she was active in the Hearing Loss Association, the Unitarian Church, and local associations. She is remembered by many for her cheerful kindness.

The family asks that donations in lieu of flowers go to the Hearing Loss Association of America or the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.