A Blog About Death & Dying
Calling the Birds Home
My mother and I have lived side by side on the same farm for decades. Our love was mutual and constant. In 2015 my mother developed vascular dementia, and with that began the loss of her emotions and her memory and the relationship of mother and daughter as we have known it for nearly 60 years.
My name is Cheryl St. Onge. I was born in Worcester, Massachusetts the only child of a Physics professor and a painter. I guess I take after the painter (my mother) and chose a creative path. I’m a photographer. Pictures are my words.
Letters to Remember
A year before my father died, shortly before I was to return to England, where I was living in my 20's, he and I sat on my parents' deck in Marion, Massachusetts, overlooking the harbor bathed in a late summer light. There, my dad, looking remarkably well for someone whose prostate cancer had metastasized into his bones, told me everything a child wants to hear from their parent—that he loved me and was proud of me. These were things I knew, but had never heard him say so directly, with such deliberateness. A few months later a letter arrived to me in England in which he expanded on his feelings about me. And though I would see him again, it proved to be his goodbye.