Coincidences?

Isn't it funny the way the internet (and life) works?

As I drove home this evening, I listened to an interview with someone who had been diagnosed with, and just started chemo for, a rare form of cancer. He is letting his battle with the disease be a public one in the hopes of raising public awareness and support for cancer research. The interview may have been targeted at folks such as me - but if so, it worked. I missed my mother tremendously in those minutes and had to put the phone down before I started calling everyone else I knew who'd lost someone to cancer in order to tell them how much I loved them and wanted to send them a big hug. It was late at night - I caught myself before I actually hit the send button.
I reasoned with myself and decided that when I got home, I'd blog.

After all - encouraging people to support cancer research is ALWAYS a good use of a blog.

By the time I got through the thunderstorm outside, did a few things in the kitchen and plugged my laptop in to charge, the idea to blog had passed, however. As is my habit, I checked Facebook... and saw a friend had found an application that tells you how common your name is in the US. I'm 99% certain that I'm the only one with my name in this country (if we include my middle names, I'm fairly certain I'm the only one in the world) but I was lured into the application - an application that told me there are three of me in this country.
Still, I could account for me appearing as three different people in databases, given my time in the DC area, in CT, and in IL. But I had to google me. After all - I had to make sure.

My mother passed away over seven years ago - two weeks before Alexandra's first birthday. Her obituary was, for a long time, a staple part of the results when my name was googled. As the years progressed, however, it moved further and further down on the list - and eventually it disappeared. After all, the newspapers don't keep all their obituaries online for perpetuity.
For at least the past year, whenever I've googled my name, that obituary has been gone.

That is, until tonight. Tonight, when I googled my name in quotation marks to see just how many me's there are, there was my mother's obituary on the third page.
And now, here I am - at my blog, and ready to blog once more about cancer...

Now you just try to tell me that she wasn't advocating for cancer awareness in her own dead spiritual way....