"When I saw the page, I began to cry and this was a catharsis that my soul needed."
My mother vibrant with life shortly before she died."Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains - but the best is lost."
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
"Dirge Without Music"
Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 13:05:42 -0600 (CST)
Subject: thank you
From: yasmin (yasmin@mindspring.com)
To: cybrgbl@deltanet.comI am not in the habit of writing to total strangers I have encountered on the internet, but in this case I felt I had to.
My father was just diagnosed with cancer (a metastasis of a cancer from a few years ago) and I began perusing articles on the internet in order to arm myself with more information about his condition. I happened upon your page dedicated to your mother. I think it was only then that I truly realized (I think I had been in shock or denial before) that I will probably lose my father in the near future.
What I really wanted to say to you, however, is thank you. Your site is touching, both to your mother's memory and also to others, like me, who are facing similar losses. When I saw the page, I began to cry and this was a catharsis that my soul needed. The last picture you have of your mother on the site, right before her death, touched me the most. Seeing her look so spent physically, yet so alive spiritually is a beautiful statement on the kind of woman she seems to have been.
I hope this finds you happy and well. Thank you again for sharing what I know is a very difficult and personal subject.
Dear Yasmin,
I am so sorry to hear about your father and his illness. I put that page up after my mother died and I advertised it on the search engines under "Stage-4 Adenocarcinoma Lung Cancer" because that is exactly what I went looking for in October of 1995 when my mother was first diagnosed with that terminal disease. I searched and searched the World Wide Web and found many impersonal sites for doctors with graphs, etc. that told me very scientifically and comprehensively that my mother was a dead woman and that she was going to die painfully. It was a sobering experience which provided me the information I wanted in the most dry and unsympathetic manner possible. I am so glad my page was able to give you a more "human" dimension to dying and death than are found in the other sites. I get a few messages like yours, and I feel totally justified in spending many many hours and dollars building this website.
As for me, I like visiting it now and again to look at my mother's smiling face now that I no longer can do so in real life.
I will say a prayer for your father tonight.
Very Truly Yours,
Richard Geib
