This blog is in response to a call out for Oasiens to submit an article for our community blog post. It’s not often that I draw a blank when seeking topics to write about. However, with this week’s blog that appears to be the case.

Dad and Irene, his first wife, grew up in Sylvester, TX, a small, dusty, West Texas town with no more than a few hundred people in the whole county. Dad never talked about Irene.

Conventional wisdom in the conservative, religious circles of my evangelical days is that dealing with death without the belief in a god and the corresponding afterlife is unbearable. In the early days after I walked away from religion without a backward glance, I often wondered what secular humanists and atheists offered to the grieving to replace that “comfort.”

My mother died unexpectedly on July 8th. Yes, she happened to be diagnosed with a brain tumor fifteen years prior to that, live cancer-free for eleven years, and have it return to leave her with a right-side disability for four years leading to her death...

That declamation burst from my lips many, many times when I was a child. Framing my early years were a father whose own childhood left him violence prone and incapable of bonding, and a benighted religious sect that was hidebound to the past.

"How are you doing? Do you need anything? Those questions still throw me back into the first hazy, grainy days after my husband, Bruce, died very suddenly November 22, 2017 from double pulmonary embolisms.

I’ve pondered a lot and questioned a lot since my mother was first diagnosed with glioblastoma, a rare form of brain cancer, and even more since her premature death at a very young and vivacious 66 years old. Mom attended Oasis with me a few times, and she fit right in here.