My only niece wrote to me, I finally replied

Dear Serena ...

Thank you so very much for you very kind and luxuriously hand-written note to me from June.

I regret very much that I have taken far too long to reply, and I regret very much that I am at this point in my life simply too ADHD to take time to write in longhand. Please, please accept this poor electronic substitute for a written letter ... my concern is no less, I assure you.

I would like to write a short biography of your grandmother for you. Do you have access to standard word processing software, so I may send you the bio in a *.DOC file? Please let me know so I can get started, and I will forward it to you as an email attachment.

The short version is: my mother died from the spread of ovarian cancer.

I wish to write the most pertinent details leading up to her ugly hospitalization, treatment, and ultimate early death. I won't make you wait for the medical history you have asked for: I will open with a one-paragraph summary so you can get an immediate answer to your primary question. However, in due respect for her, it would please me if you would read it thoroughly. I am quite willing to go further into any areas where you still have questions after you read my biography.

After her death, I rejoined the service in 1987 and spent my first year back stationed on Yerba Buena Island. I was a 31 year old roustabout on a sea-going construction tender. My tools were chain hooks, a sledge hammer, a cutting torch, anchors shackles buoy scrapers. The extreme physical labor was the best cure available for my sorrow over losing mom.

When I had leisure time I would drive my 1964 Volvo 122S to the Sunset neighborhood. I liked the restaurants and movie theatre. (Wish I had bought that $200,000 home I had looked at.) I would also go frequently to Land's End and sit in the fog next to the seagrass, listening to the Golden Gate horn bellow.

I adore the life you and Cole have fashioned. I think of you as our family's Chelsea Clinton, except you are not a money-grubbing investment banker. I admire your husband although we have never met. I wish I were in position to rejoin our family but I do not think I have the years left to do so. One of my fondest photographs is one of you elbow deep in a jack-o-lantern we were cutting in the backyard of your home in Albuquerque. The year would have been 1982 or 83 I guess.

Please reply so I will know you have received this.

Thank you for your patience.
Uncle Phillip
Yorktown, Virginia