Today is January 31st, 2025, but I will be post dating this post to April of last year, so that I can then proceed and share other things that have happened since. I really haven’t posted to the blog in all of 2024 because losing my mom was so hard. In some ways it felt like life ground to a halt, and in other ways it felt like a shotgun start to a sprint we didn’t want to run. I couldn’t post regular old posts to the blog until I shared this, but also, how do you make a post like this?
On April 15th, 2024, my mom, the best mom, died peacefully at home, surrounded by her three children, and joining together again with my father, who she dearly missed since his passing in 2014.
The obituary my brother wrote can be read here
A year before she passed, we got her a Storyworth subscription and she faithfully wrote little essays each week. My sister transcribed her handwriting and found pictures to accompany many of the stories and the book was printed. She was THRILLED with the resulting book. As an English teacher, lover of writing, reading and words in general, over the years our family had bought a handful of the types of journal books that have prompts, but this was the first and only one that I can recall that was actually finished. After she passed I found this particular prompt and we worked some of it into her obituary.
“How Do You Want Future Generations of Your Family to Remember You?
I would like future generations to remember me as a kind and caring person who tried to live by the Golden Rule, who had a devout faith in God and who enjoyed her vocation of being a teacher.
Hopefully they’ll know me as someone who loved words, stories, movies and TV. Who liked puzzles but hated spiders, mean-ness, and mushrooms. As someone who valued tradition and found change difficult. Who loved flowers and being warm (the heating pad was my friend :)
And finally as someone who loved to laugh.
Kathleen Ellen Surdyk Wells”
In the fall of 2024 former colleagues and friends of my mom’s from her days working at Huntley Middle School in DeKalb, Illinois put together money to donate to the school’s library in her name, purchased this plaque in her memory and held a beautiful gathering where many of them stood up and shared stories and memories of working with her.
She’s on my mind everyday, and her absence AND presence is felt in every area of my life.
