What now?

What do you do after the loss of your parents? It's like floating in the air under a parachute, wondering where you will touch down.
I'm trying to keep busy - going paddling as much as possible, because that is my great stress release. Everyone at work has been very kind to me and my sister. I find myself thinking strange thoughts, like, "Well, mom outlived Bin Laden".
I've also been watching PATTON for the first time; it's on Netflix online. Wow what a great movie. It also strikes me as being a movie about my parents' generation, the best of us I think. My father and my uncles on both sides of my family were all in WWII. My mom was born in 1930, so during the events in the movie she would have been a young teenager. My father was in his 20's, as he was born in 1920.
I took a playboating class last weekend (my penchant for non-sequiturs has remained solid) and it was hard for me to get into at first. We stayed for a couple of hours at the Slow Joe wave at the NOC, then went up to the top and played down to the Ledges. I even thought, as we drove to the put-in, that I might just bow out for the rest of the class. Details of my mother's suffering in the hospital kept popping into my head. But I decided to keep with the class, I went anyway and I am glad I did. I rolled a lot and that cold Nanty water got my mind out of its funk, at least for awhile. This was during the Boaterchik festival, and that night we all had barbeque and beers at the festival and I and my group of friends slept in this crazy bunkhouse, in sleeping bags because it got pretty nippy at night. The next day we had the second part of the playboating class and again, at first I wasn't really into it. We put on at Ferebee and went down to the stern squirt spot behind the flat rock, and that cold water slapped me upside the head over and over and it was the best thing. We paddled to the takeout and I had a good line at the falls.
Crossfit has been helping too - it is such a ridiculously hard class, every time, that it drives any bad thoughts out of my head and replaces them with sweat and gasping for air. I have had great improvements in my paddling from it, both in terms of strength of strokes and in terms of stamina (metcon aerobic endurance). Most of my classmates are much younger than me and run rings around me, but I soldier on. It is a positive and encouraging environment.
This is a rambling mess but I'll post it anyway.

My momma

My momma passed away last night around 7:30. She had terminal cancer in her lungs. It was a very fast sickness and she spent less than a week in the hospital.
The Palliative Care Unit at UAB was wonderful to my mom. So was the general medicine wing of Spain Wallace. So was the ER at UAB. I can't tell you enough about how sweet everybody that worked there was to my mom and to my family.

Here is a picture of my momma and my poppa that I love.