Frank Paynter:

I've been enormously saddened by the death of Beth's mom, Helen Vincent in Newark, Delaware on October 3rd.  Here's a link to her obituary.  Comments that Senator Carper read into the Congressional Record on October 8 are reproduced below.

It has been a sad time.  I've felt stressed and depressed.  And I've felt lonely at the self-imposed separation from Beth that I/we chose in order for me to attend the Digital Identity World conference from the 9th through the 11th.  I returned home tonight.  Beth returns Sunday.  We've both been burning up cell time and roaming charges.

I'm going to blog about the conference separately here.  Perhaps tomorrow.  

We can't choose when a loved one will die.  And I doubt that there is ever a good time for it. I was conflicted to attend this conference so soon after Helen's funeral.  I left straight from the reception.  Meanwhile, I'm helping to put together a conference that takes place November 2 and I had to simply trust that the people I'm working with would move it forward without me.  And I had a time-critical website project that I passed off to another developer.  And I have a talk to give Sunday that I haven't prepared for.  And at least three other things that had seemed pretty important to Beth and me were deferred or skipped because our priorities took a hard right turn into death and remembrance on October 3rd.  now we're starting to dig out.

Senator's Carper and Biden sent senior aides to the funeral.  At least Helen wasn't alive to see both her senators (Democrats!?!) vote "yes" to authorize President Bush to use military force, if necessary, to disarm Iraq.  She would have compared it to the Gulf of Tonkin at best, and she would not have tolerated it.

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[a klog apart Obituaries a la Blog]