Sixth Anniversary of Nannette's Passing

September 11, 2007 marks the 6^th anniversary of Mom’s passing. As the days have become years and time continues to march on, the pain and sadness associated with my loss and out loss becomes less and less and we don’t think of her as often as we did, life does go on. A while back Christine told me how after her father died that while all the pain and feelings she felt weren’t fun, the intensity made her feel close to her father and remember more. That is something that has stayed with me. Of course we all know that time heals all wounds (or so it is said) and that the intensity of our loss can’t stay as strong as it was.

After Mom died, I thought of her very often. In our culture men are discouraged from crying and often from showing their emotions. In this sense I have always kept a lot of things to myself and not really been overly emotional, not that I didn’t (and don’t) feel things, just that I don’t display it a whole lot. My point here is that for the longest time it didn’t take much to bring me to the verge of tears, maybe I even had a few, when something made me think of Mom. In the first few years after she died, this happened very often and now I find that it doesn’t happen so often.

Music has always been a big part of my life, I think that this goes back to when I sang Don McClean’s “American Pie” non-stop on our cross-country family trip to Phoenix for Aunt DeeAnn’s wedding. When Anna-Katharina was born I had my first experience where a song actually gave me goose bumps and brought tears to my eyes. I had enjoyed Creed’s “Open Arms” for a couple of years prior to her birth but driving to the hospital after she was born and listening to it in the car, it suddenly had a whole different effect than it had in the past, now I was experiencing the song as a new proud father and related to it on a whole different level. Thinking further I remember how we all cried at Mom’s funeral when we heard the bag piper play “Brave Scotland”, but considering how funerals are generally sad and there are often people crying, maybe this isn’t such a surprise. For people that weren’t there it might be hard to imagine that scene, or maybe they can easily relate. Also at the funeral I heard Enya’s “Only Time”. I had heard that song many times before that and in fact Mom really liked her. After that anytime that I heard that song I would think of Mom. Before Christine and I moved to Germany, we visited Mom and Dad twice in Henderson. On our last evening we saw the Fountains of the Beligio and as the fountains danced for the last time in one of the sets we heard Andre Bocelli and Sarah Brightman singing “Time to Say Goodbye”. So this was us saying goodbye to Las Vegas, America, and to Mom. I have often thought of the day that we left Las Vegas that Easter time. I have never been someone that is big on goodbyes and I usually try to stop people from being sad, because in my mind it only makes saying goodbye all that harder. I was busy getting ready to leave and hadn’t really thought too much about the goodbye part and as we were leaving and I saw Mom at the door and how sad she was and then I became real sad. I don’t know if she was thinking it at that moment, but I believe that she was, that this was the last time that I would see her. At the time it hadn’t occurred to me that this was really the last time that I would see her. I think that in the back of my mind I was still thinking that I would see her again. I wonder sometimes if I had realized prior to that moment that this would be the last time, would I have done or said anything different?

I remember getting the call from Dad and he said that Mom wasn’t doing too well and that now would be the time to come. I booked a flight to Vegas but it wasn’t scheduled till the next week I believe. I was at work on September 11^th and Christine called me, she said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and that I should come home right then. I certainly had no idea about the gravity of the situation at that point and hadn’t seen the coverage on television at that point. When I was driving home I turned on the local AFN (Armed Forces Network) radio station and they were carrying the NPR radio coverage. By this time the second plane had hit. It was now that the magnitude of what had happened started to sink in. I walked into our apartment and Christine was waiting for me at the door. I had seen that she had been crying and was sad, but my first thought was of the planes hitting the World Trade Center. As she said that Dad had called, I sensed that she was going to tell me that Mom had passed away. Since the television was on CNN International, it wasn’t too long before I saw the awful footage that most of the world has seen at least once (in not a million times since then) and at that point the September 11^th Attacks and Mom’s death were now forever connected in my mind. There are many things that happen in life that we don’t understand and for which we believe that there must be a reason. Since Mom had been a nurse, it was somehow comforting to think that God needed her to help with all the victims of that day. For me every time that I hear September 11^th or 911, I can’t help but think of Mom. For the first few years, this event was mentioned so often and even now it is still spoken of quite often.

For much of my life I have been interested in writing and it is a way that I can express myself. For this reason I think that I have found myself drawn to blogging. While I would certainly like to think that what I have written is being read, to be honest, most of it probably isn’t, but that isn’t why I write. Giving myself the opportunity to remember Mom and just knowing that my words are in cyber space is comforting. Keeping this blog is one of my ways of keeping Mom’s memory alive.

The photos that I have posted are from Nicole and Heather's weddings in 1995. I recently scanned these in honor of this event. As we approach the sixth anniversary of September 11th, I hope that you'll join me in Remembering Nannette.

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