Writing thank you notes

Fritzi brought me up right to write thank you notes promptly and feel really guilty if I didn't. How funny that she still nags me, albeit gently, in a way that will urge me toward health.

I have a list of wonderful people/friends/family/generous souls to write, thanking each of them for their memorial gifts to the museum fund. In the other-dimension first week after Mom's death, I wrote many thank yous. The process was extremely healing. Each small inky verbalization of explanation, sadness, and gratitude was a step in my acceptance of the reality, an expression of true appreciation for the gifts and thoughtful givers, and a powerful impetus toward recalling more pleasant memories and images of my mother.

Now, after a couple weeks attempting to resume "normal life", I find myself dreading the small written meditations in gratitude, memory, and grief that I know deep-down will be healing. It's the renewed verbalizing of the experience that frightens me. Repeating words clarifies the ordeal, but also limits and sets the experience in stone. Still, I would be verbalizing the experience from a different spot than that in the recent/distant time. I'm at a different roadside scenic turn-out, overlooking a vista where a cataclysmic event wiped out life as we know it. The lava cooled into solid and sharp stones. The landscape was gradually reforested. Aren't the wildflowers gorgeous, especially the tiny pale blue star-shaped ones? Perhaps pressing death and loss into a block, a concrete cornerstone and setting it in our gut is how we go forward, although slower, heavier, and leaning a bit more to one side.