Our last six months have been quite stressful. My husband Dean’s mother died in December right after we moved them to the locked unit of their Senior Living facility. Then we moved his father back to a regular apartment in the building 3 months later due to his Alzheimers Disease which appears to be progressing now. Then two weeks later we needed to move his father to an entirely new Senior Living establishment in another area of suburban Minneapolis. It has not been a wonderful winter and that is just the person issues and has nothing to do with the weather here in Minnesota which has been a bear this year.

Helping to move Dean’s parents has been a mind opening experience for me and changed a lot of things I think about and do. I have a new process of accumulation here in my home. I don’t want anyone to have to go through all of my stuff and make decisions about what to keep… what to donate… what to trash. Ugh, so many decisions with his parents’ possessions that broke my heart.

So, I am going through everything I own now and making these decisions ahead of time so my family will not deal with these things once I have passed. Believe me when I say, I feel good and don’t believe it will be in the near future and hoping not before I get a chance to go through everything I own. But once it’s done I have a new plan… anything that come into the house maybe something else goes out of the house. MAYBE… just maybe, we can stop from accumulating too much stuff.

I always thought life would be forever. When you are young you don’t think about all of your possessions going unneeded or unwanted but it is true, that happens. And when I ponder and consider my most treasured possessions and things I value none of these are things that came down or were treasured possessions of those I loved who have passed. And so it is. We love and value what we each love and value. My most treasured possessions of those who have passed on are not a physical possession that they valued, but rather emotional memories of time and events spent with them, Heavy sigh… life is simply hard and decisions have to be made and then we pass.

But, on another more positive note, the third book in my Sci Fi Series of “The Hidden Lifeforms” novels is about two thirds finished. Although I have struggled to find time to work on it with everything else going on in my life… I am plugging away and when stuck I retreat to the studio and think about where the book should be going while I paint away splashing paint on a canvas.

And I try not to take myself too seriously… and of course to be gentle with myself. This year I really realize and it was brought home with a vengence that “Life is hard… and then you die.”