Blogging block

I have not been blogging in a while. Part of it is the baby, and part of it is that so many people have stopped blogging now. I miss the days when there were so many bloggers. Facebook/Twitter are not the same. On FB I know all the people and the updates are so brief. It's great for remembering birthdays, but otherwise all it does is suck up my time on superficial updates.

Anyhow, back to blogging and the main reason that I haven't had the heart to write anything. A while back I went through my blogger list. I would check and see when the last post of a blog had been and if it had been a year or so before, I deleted the blog from my list.  Unfortunately there were many of those. There was one, my all-time favourite writer, who hadn't updated since the spring. I remember quickly reading his posts on my blog feed back in the spring but as it was right around the time that my son got out of hospital, I wasn't commenting. Anyhow, I missed his writing. He was, and is, the best writer I've ever read outside of a literature course. Many of us blog, some of us are excellent at building community, but this guy - this guy could write like no one else.

He was one of the few bloggers who I had ended up linking up with on Facebook so I went on there to see what he was up to. I planned to email him and say something like, "get off your lazy ass and post again." When I looked him up on FB, lo and behold, it was his birthday. I was going to join in all the birthday wishes until I noticed that several of them were saying such things as, "Hope you are partying with Saint Peter".  I almost threw up. My favourite blogger wasn't taking a break, he wasn't off doing exciting things... he had died unexpectedly. Probably just a couple of days after that last post I had read.

I have since reached out to his brother. I told him about the blog his brother had kept. Yet I felt so sick about blogging for so long. Sort of as if anything I tried to write or express was irrelevant. I still feel that way but I'm going to go on blogging and writing as a salute to my friend, who I only knew by his phenomenal command of the written word. Be well my friend.

*No one else who I know through blogging followed or linked to him so I have not linked his blog here. I'm explaining my head space - not trying to be overly dramatic and I want to respect his privacy, even if it doesn't really matter now