marksaleski.com

One very important chore I had to do in preparation for the Joanna BBQ was to put together a slidehow. As luck would have it, mom had spent quite a bit of time a while back scanning in a ton of pictures from her photo albums. I spent several eyeball-burning hours picking through all of that content to find things that made sense to put on display.

What you see here are two of my absolute favorites. One is a picture of mom and dad having dinner at the Lexington Hotel in New York City back in the late 1950’s. The other is a cool picture of my dad and his duckpin bowling team. My goodness, did people dress up back then or what?!

The Joanna Saleski BBQ and Appreciation Social went off beautifully this past Saturday. We ended up with a nice mix of family and friends. I think the headcount was close to 35. The weather held and there was more than enough food to go around (anybody want any more potato salad?).

It was a strangely powerful and moving experience to be in the same space with groups of people who have been parts of various and overlapping phases of mom’s life. There were cousins I’ve known since I was a toddler and friends I’ve known since high school and college. It was terrific.

The picture above is of me with Steve (roommate from UMaine), Kevin (cohort from UMaine), Tyler (dear friend since about the age of 15).

I know, I know…I should act a little more mature when the camera comes out. Sorry. Anyhow, this is me just bein’ friendly…with Tyler’s wife Meg to my left and longtime buddy Gene to my right.

I promise that my writing is not going to turn into a series of essays on how I’m dealing with a lack of parent. That said (hmmm….that might be the first time ever that I’ve said “that said”), this kind of life-changing experience puts an extreme amount of mental torque into parts of the brain.

As said before, it had become pretty much impossible to get any writing done during the last few months. The one thing I didn’t give up on was listening. I didn’t do a whole lot of shuffling of the CDs in my bag though, so there were many repeats. Spring Heel Jack was one of them.

I’d be willing to bet that Songs & Themes got at least 20 plays. Strangely enough, it took all of that time before the parallels began to emerge.

Wow, I always wondered what it would be like to on the “other side” of the death of a parent. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how it feels. There’s a sense of relief that the suffering has passed. There are also tremendous feelings of dislocation and the surreal.

I had lunch with a friend of mine yesterday and those ideas relentlessly popped into my head: “Did that really happen?”…”Am I sitting here talking about the death of my mom?”…”I can’t go back home and tell her about it?”

Anyway, here’s my first attempt at saying goodbye.

The house of Saleski has been under an exceeding amount of stress over the past few months. At first, they thought she had bronchitis. About a week after that, Mom went into the hospital with complaints of severe shortness of breath. She had a large amount (over a liter) of fluid around her right lung. Futher analysis confirmed a recurrence of the uterine cancer that we thought had been successfully dealt with two years ago.

Initial treatment plans were to get Mom a little stronger for a round of chemotherapy. That never happened. After weeks of stomach problems, chest tubes, blood clots, and internal bleeding, Mom was given about a month to live.

Yesterday, Mom’s body (and spirit) gave in. She passed on at a little after 4pm.

Word cannot express how much we loved mom. We’ll never stop.

Stress does a lot of funny things to your perception muscles. For me, I tend to become more receptive to long, indirect trains of thought.

One night, while listening to this record, Roy Acuff’s “The Precious Jewel” really hit close to home.

I’ve used the word ‘resonance’ quite a bit over the years. This time around, it makes even more sense than normal.

What?! You’ve never heard this Little Feat album? Take it from me: this is one of the top five live rock records ever. You can’t go wrong with it. Seriously!

Waiting For Columbus also happens to be one of the first ‘grownup’ records I ever purchased.

Check it out.

There have always been arguments about the ECM sound. Some people think it’s too “laid back” (man, I hate that description). Others think that it’s “cold.”

Since these are basically personal opinions, I can’t really put up an argument. Besides, I’ve always had too much fun listening to great music by people like Bill Frisell.