I've decided to scan and transcribe Mom's journals so that my family and I will have a written history of her life. It feels weird to be reading Mom's journals while she's still alive. I hope she doesn't mind. It's good therapy for me to read about Mom's life. I'm in a period of mourning, and reading about her life from her point of view when she was still "with it" is helpful.
She wasn't doing very well today. Very confused and incoherent. It's days like this that make me very glad she's being taken care of where she is. I feel a sense of sadness, though. Even though she's being well taken care of where she is, I just wish she didn't have to spend the remaining years of her life in a home. It isn't what she would have wanted. It's what she needs, but it isn't what she would have wished.
I also am sad to watch everything she worked so long and hard to build be sucked away to pay for a home she doesn't even want to be in. But such is life.
As I've begun transcribing her journals, I am trying to copy what came from her original hand - spelling and grammar errors included. The editor in me would like to correct some of that, but I think it's important to keep her words as she originally wrote them.
I just picked the first journal I saw. It happens to be about our trip to Europe in 1994 right after she picked me up from my mission. It's fun to read and also fun to see what was important to her on the trip vs. what I remember from it.
One thing she commented on was a tour we took at night in London called Bus Trip to Murder which took us around to the scary parts of London or the areas that dealt with murders or ghosts. It was interesting that Mom commented about our tour guide at the time because I remember him very well.
He was young actor (he would have been 22 when we met him) who did these tours as a side job. His name was Dominic and he had recently been in a TV movie portraying the younger version of a character played by Michael York. He was charming, funny, knowledgeable, charismatic, and, in Mom's words, "delightful." He was a great tour guide.
As I read about our trip, I was curious what might have become of Dominic. In this Google age, I figured it wouldn't be too hard to track him down, especially if I could just find the name of the movie he had been in with Michael York.
Sure enough, I found him pretty quickly. I found out his name was Dominic Knutton (we never knew his last name at the time). The first thing I found out about him was this article. As I read it, I thought, "Oh, that's cool! He became a director and started his own theatre company. Good for him!"
My joy soon turned to sadness when I came upon this obituary. I guess he committed suicide in 2008. I didn't even know the guy, but felt a strange sadness for him. He really did leave a positive impression on Mom and me when we took that tour 18 years ago, and I just felt sad for the loss of such a delightful person. In a pre-Google age I likely never would have ever known what happened to Dominic. I didn't know him other than that one brief night, but I'm sad that he was in such an unhappy place at the end of his life.
Here's to you, Dominic! Wherever you are, I hope you're happy. Thanks for entertaining my mom and me one lovely March night in 1994.
