Timeline -- Introduction
As I write this, it’s exactly one year since Jane died. I’m doing reasonably well, but that’s still not easy, and it drives home that I have some unfinished business. At the funeral and the memorial service, I focused on telling people about how she lived -- that’s the most important part. But I also need to tell the story of how she died.
This isn’t going to be easy, either to write or read; I’ll be kind of surprised if I can get through it without breaking down a few times. I’m not going to fault anyone who wants to just skip it, and I’ll put it behind cut tags. But I need to get it out of my head: I need to know that the story is written down and known, so that I can move on from it. Also, it’s rather cathartic (and somehow very appropriate) to dredge through the history and thread it together into a coherent story for the first time. So there will be some other significant passings and events woven through here: this is partly a story of Jane’s life, partly of her death, and partly of how the past ten years have affected me.
So I’ll be serializing that in the coming days. Could take me anywhere from a couple of days to a month to write it down, depending on how things go. It’ll have the “Timeline” title and be tagged as jane throughout. It’s going to be in approximate chronological order, but often with broad dates: my memory for details is infamously bad, and I’m not going to make myself crazy figuring out precise dates. God bless LJ, for providing me with a record of much of it.
As part of that, I’ll be opening up and linking to a bunch of deeply-locked LJ entries, chronicling what happened in real time. It looked like I was being fairly quiet online at the time; in fact, I was posting more frantically than I ever have in my life. But Jane was very private about it -- she always worried about people pitying her -- so I had to keep it quite locked-down at the time. Now, with a little distance, I think the genealogist and historian in her would prefer that the story be known. Please take it in that light, and remember her strength, not the frailty of her final days.
(I will only be unlocking my own entries, not hers -- her journal is her own, and I’m leaving it as she did. Forgive me for linking to some entries that will always be locked, often quite tightly, especially in the early history: this is as much for my future reference as anything.)
This isn’t going to be easy, either to write or read; I’ll be kind of surprised if I can get through it without breaking down a few times. I’m not going to fault anyone who wants to just skip it, and I’ll put it behind cut tags. But I need to get it out of my head: I need to know that the story is written down and known, so that I can move on from it. Also, it’s rather cathartic (and somehow very appropriate) to dredge through the history and thread it together into a coherent story for the first time. So there will be some other significant passings and events woven through here: this is partly a story of Jane’s life, partly of her death, and partly of how the past ten years have affected me.
So I’ll be serializing that in the coming days. Could take me anywhere from a couple of days to a month to write it down, depending on how things go. It’ll have the “Timeline” title and be tagged as jane throughout. It’s going to be in approximate chronological order, but often with broad dates: my memory for details is infamously bad, and I’m not going to make myself crazy figuring out precise dates. God bless LJ, for providing me with a record of much of it.
As part of that, I’ll be opening up and linking to a bunch of deeply-locked LJ entries, chronicling what happened in real time. It looked like I was being fairly quiet online at the time; in fact, I was posting more frantically than I ever have in my life. But Jane was very private about it -- she always worried about people pitying her -- so I had to keep it quite locked-down at the time. Now, with a little distance, I think the genealogist and historian in her would prefer that the story be known. Please take it in that light, and remember her strength, not the frailty of her final days.
(I will only be unlocking my own entries, not hers -- her journal is her own, and I’m leaving it as she did. Forgive me for linking to some entries that will always be locked, often quite tightly, especially in the early history: this is as much for my future reference as anything.)