Deb Diagnoses a Dilemma

I thought I would share the story of how this blog came to be. A couple years ago a friend of mine (Deb) said “Kathy I think there’s a Blog in you dying to come out.” She might have been right at the time, I think she was, but there was no way I wanted to think about starting something at that point, I had a lot going on. Fast forward to this set of months we have been living. Its been hard and the writing and sharing I have usually done on Facebook just didn’t seem a good fit for me anymore. At the same time, maybe as part of my healing from grief and burnout, I started to have some dreams. They were slightly odd but they were helpful and I started to feel better. Then almost a month ago I had a dream about my grade 3 teacher. She was a good teacher and I had liked her very much. I was really pleased when at some point in the 1990s I came across her while she was doing some volunteer work in Saskatoon, she was retired, healthy and she remembered me. Now its 2021, and when I woke up from that dream that included her I thought to myself, “I need to see if she is still alive.” I picked up my phone and I put in her name. I was thankful not to have an obituary come up. Instead what came was a link to a blog. It was her nieces blog, the story I was directed to included a picture and a little bit about her, it was quite recent. I looked around at the blog and enjoyed it and I thought to myself “I need to ask this woman about blogging!” I found her email on her page and I sent her a message. I included the top two questions that I had. I also was able to get the address for her aunt and get a letter ready to send her, she is 98 years old now. It was awesome to receive Marylou’s reply. She said that one of the top benefits of blogging for her was the way it allowed her to connect with people from a variety of places. That gave me goosebumps. I decided to go for it, started getting set up and then did the launch a couple weeks ago. It has been a good experience for sure and different from Facebook which I seemed to need. As I think about what has unfolded I can’t help but think about the fact that my grade 3 teacher, who likely was among the first to work with me on things like sentence structure, has indirectly given me something at this late stage in the game. She is 98 and I am 52 and still her legacy, the impression she made on me, something, was stirring in me to make me dream about her. That led to contact with MaryLou and the courage/the push to consider doing this thing which i am really enjoying. I think that’s really neat. I wonder what it was about our connection that prompted that dream that night. Maybe the truth is, our teachers are never really done with us.