Today was another difficult day.
Luckily there were people I could talk to.

Someone decided that my mother needed not one, but two obituaries.
They can be read online, that's where I found both of them.
The situation was this:
my mother stayed where she was born and raised until her father died.
Then she relocated across the country,
and lived her last forty years there --
of which roughly thirty years were in good health, before the end.

So the two obituaries were place-specific:
one for the area where my mother spent the early part of her life,
and another for the area where she relocated.
And yes, the obituaries were different -- related, but different.

In the place she came from, and published in their local newspaper,
the obituary did all the formal things,
identifying the pre-deceased and the survivors,
mentioning the parents and the upbringing,
all the places she went to school, and the divorce from the father of her children.
There was a brief paragraph about her relocation elsewhere, where she died.

In the place where she died, there was next to nothing about her life before she moved there.
Instead the obituary pretty much started with, "[name] moved to such-and-such a city in such-and-such a year," and went on from there.
Much attention was given to all the volunteering that she did in her healthy years there,
and to her time in assisted living and memory care. (Alzheimer's)

So it is almost as if she lived two lives in one.
ONe of my friends asked me who wrote these two obituaries,
and of course they never print the person who writes them.

Online obituaries can have photographs attached,
and both of them did -- completely different photos as well between each obituary.
I think looking at some of those photos was triggering for me a little bit, which is not surprising.