Sudden but not exactly unexpected... I am still rather out of it, and things are very strange.

Born in the part of Yugoslavia that had been Austro-Hungary before the war, Mom grew up secular, celebrating Christmas with live candles on the tree. When the Nazis came in though, she and her family were considered jews; mom was liberated from Auschwitz the day before her 16th birthday, apparently looking like those scarecrow skeletons that you couldn't tell if they were alive or not (she was). She escaped from behind the Iron Curtain with her little brother to France, and then came to the States in the early 50's where she married my dad whom she had met in Paris. As many of you know he was killed by terrorists in 1983, but mom endured.

From the mid-sixties till dad's death we lived in Africa, mostly in the Ivory Coast, where Mom and Dad raised 4 daughters of whom I am the youngest. Mom also leaves 8 grandchildren (4 boys, 4 girls, 4 twins, 4 singletons), a great-granddaughter, and will have missed the birth of her first great-grandson by what is likely to be days rather than weeks. Also surviving her are her brother and Dad's, 10 niblings and their 24 children; and many cousins and their descendants, in North and South America, Eastern, Western and Central Europe, near Asia and the far East, West and North Africa and Down Under.

An era has ended yet all seems the same. How odd. Love you all.