It's been a little more than eight months. The time has passed slowly and quickly, a loosely wound reel-to-reel movie that's mostly in focus but in parts, blurred and choppy.

		Steve Levin is a Post-Gazette staff writer (slevin@post-gazette.com).

Work continues. Life goes on. It's for the living, you know.

Tiger Woods' dad dies. Soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan. A father and two of his kids die in a freak accident. Don Knotts dies. Candy Barr dies. A friend dies. The woman at the dry cleaners dies.

I swear each death takes a little piece of my soul with it.

"You'll miss me when I'm gone," my mother used to tell my sisters and me. She always said it with a laugh after we complained about one of her outrageous statements or seemingly capricious rules, and we would laugh, too.

But we do miss her.

Losing a parent creates a void. There's the physical separateness, of course, but it's the emotional chasm that's impossible to cross. With all connections severed, thoughts, words and deeds seem destined only for a vacuum.

I know that in addition to physical death there is emotional death and spiritual death. Some people are dying in their jobs even as they punch in or cash paychecks. I know people who are dying in their marriages, too. For that matter, there are people dying who have no idea that they are, whether from addictions, illness or ignorance.

As a young adult, I thought nothing of flying across the country to attend funerals of acquaintances or family friends, feeling deeply the importance of having a final chance to say goodbye.

Now, there seem to be too many funerals. Relatives are dying at an alarming rate. Former teachers, subjects of stories, classmates, friends -- they're leaving this world faster than my budget or emotions can keep up.

I don't even have time to write about their passing.

Laura Braun died this month. She and her husband and son moved here from Berkeley Springs, W.Va., nine months ago. Dr. Braun was founder and director of the Barbour Institute & Spa for women in West Virginia. An independent woman, she believed that health required physical, emotional and spiritual wellness, and she committed herself to practicing that. She planned to open a new spa here. But what started this winter as a backache and slight cough ended up being leukemia. She was out of town when she was rushed to the hospital. She died at 59. No one got to tell her goodbye.

Joanne Johnson died in February. She had been behind the counter at Northumberland Cleaners in Squirrel Hill for 18 years. The first time I met her she was so gruff I thought she might bite. When I came in the next time I greeted her with, "How's Ms. Sunshine?" From then on we grinned and laughed each time we saw each other. By mid-February, Ms. Johnson, 64, had been sick for two weeks. She told co-workers she had been to the doctor and been diagnosed with bronchitis. But she hadn't gone. She went to sleep one night, had a heart attack and never woke up.

Candy Barr died on either Dec. 30 or Jan. 1 depending on different accounts. She and I were "special friends," or so she wrote on the autographed photo she gave me. Arguably the nation's most famous burlesque dancer of the 1950s and early 1960s, she had scandalous connections to Dallas mobsters and various politicians. She shot one of her ex-husbands in the stomach with a pistol and then claimed she had missed -- she'd been aiming for his groin.

My friends from my newspaper days in Texas still make fun of the day I spent with Ms. Barr, whose real name was Juanita Dale Slusher. That day -- I interviewed her for a story about people who had recovered from scandals -- she gave me an autographed copy of her book, "A Gentle Mind, Confused," consisting of poems she'd written while in prison on a trumped-up drug charge. I still have the book.

And my Texas friends still call me that: a gentle mind, confused.

They may have a point. Writing about the death of a legendary exotic dancer in the same column as my mother's death surely strikes some as strange. But my mom would have appreciated the juxtaposition. She liked jarring people, either through deeds or words. Her antics at the staid faculty parties she attended with my dad are legendary in their own right.

Eight months is a long time and yet it's nothing. A friend of mine lost his mother when he was 3. The only memories he has of her are photos.

I can already see the memories of my mother changing. Slowly, they've become computer-assisted, my recall of looks, ways, warts and life easily manipulated to conform to need or convenience. Eight months later, her passing has become less about her as it has grown to become more about who I am.

The past eight months has meant being on time to lead prayers with a minyan of 10 Jewish men three times a day, and saying Kaddish, a special mourning prayer. For me, it has been a spiritual, emotional and physical challenge, an intense schedule of honoring my mother in our ancient tradition as only an only son can.

So what is left? I'm not sure. Everyone who has lost a parent tells me two things: You never get over it and time helps the healing.

What I am really mourning, I think, is the past. You can't mourn what you never had, in this case a relationship continuing into the present and beyond.

I've come to realize that even within loss, by exhausting the status quo, by pushing beyond comfort zones, there is an opportunity to connect to the soul of another. And I know that only by taking advantage of such chances, can I remain connected to my mom.