Winter Olympics

This summer quarter, I'm taking a class "Death" put on by the Anthropology Department and the Jackson School of International Studies.  As the class has progressed, I can see how difficult it is to keep the material apart form people's experiences.  It's a fairly large class for summer (30 people).  Many are young students; but some are older.  And, as we all go along, death touches all of our lives.

I gave her my piece "Winter Olympics;" which I wrote when I took the memoir program.  It appeared in their journal Stratus.  Written in memoir style, I describe my mother's death as experienced by me and my two adult siblings.  I integrate the 2010 Winter Olympics throughout the piece.  My mother died during the Olympics and she always loved them. The instructor has put it up in the discussion section of the campus website.

It has a specific cry line and a dynamite closing sentence.

My mother feared being alone at the end, but she wasn’t. Her children stayed
peacefully with her, along with the ski jumpers blasting down the mountains, soaring
into the air, and the figure skaters spinning and spinning.