Mom’s birthday

Today is my mother’s 78th birthday, which she was not able to actually enjoy on the outside of the planet. I’ve thought about her all day. Thinking about my mother is not necessarily a completely happy situation; she was a staggeringly complicated person. Some of that is no doubt attributable to the complexity of her family life as a child. Her mother and father divorced when she was still a very little girl, in the 1930s when this was not a popular thing to do. Her father was subsequently killed in World War II, in 1944 when she was 11 years old.




A piece of my mother's gravestone, which my
stepfather Clark gave to each of us.

 

After we published her obituary (and it was put online by the newspaper) it was a curious discovery for us to find that we were contacted by a young (and incredibly generous and kind) French man who was researching the soldiers who died in France near the end of the war. We learned a tremendous amount of information about her father, including finding a photo of him which we never had before. It was really pretty fantastic.



John Newton Apperson, my mother's father, in the uniform of the
Richmond Light Infantry Blues. He was awarded a Purple Heart,
and buried in the US Military Cemetery Rhone, Draguignan, France.



Clark sent me much of the “archive” such as it was of my mother’s early life, which I have cataloged, scanned, and provided to the family. It tells much of the missing information from her early life. She never wanted to talk about any of these things, which we didn’t understand. At least now we know a bit more about them all, and their complex lives, and the deep love of some of them for each other which had been previously unknown to us.

On another day I will publish the material I wrote for her 75th birthday, which is her “real” eulogy.