For Better or For Worse - ending storyline

Yesterday I was unexpectedly teary to read the last Sunday comic in the original storyline of For Better or For Worse.

Dave and I had just gone out for breakfast and we were sitting in the parking lot of Bev Mo, and I was finishing reading the Sunday paper (i'd saved the comics from breakfast).
And I just got unexpectedly emotional.

Mom loved For Better or For Worse, as far as we remember. Lynn Johnston started drawing the strip in 1979, when I was 5 and the twins were just born.
I remember being slightly afraid of how messy and crazy everything was for Elly, the mom in these cartoons. She had Michael, who was 3 or 4 (just a little younger than me) and Elizabeth, who was a toddler, and all kinds of mayhem was always happening.

I'm pretty sure Mom had at least these two books ("David, We're Pregnant" and "Do They Ever Grow Up?") - pictured. These were pre-FBorFW, but the parents on the "David We're Pregnant" look an awful lot like the Pattersons).
These were Lynn's 1st and 3rd books of cartoons - which are currently out of print and hard to find (wonder if Dad has them still?).
When I'm thinking now about me reading the strips to see what it would be like to have a mother alive now
-- it hits me that my mom was reading the books above when she had 1 (or 3) little kids, and no mother of her own to ask for advice either (her mom died 4 months before I was born).
Lynn Johnston may be providing mother advice and reassurance to two generations!

After reading the strip about the original storyline ending, I realized what I was really most sad about was that this was one more thing that was no longer going to be the same (or at least similar) to what it was like when Mom was alive.
It has been so comforting to see FBorFW whenever I check out a newspaper or remember to go get a strip fix online. I imagine that Elly, the mom in the strip, is similar to what Mom would be like now, since I never got a chance to really know Mom as an adult.

Especially this August's storyline - where Elizabeth gets married to Anthony.
I was also moved when Michael got married, to see what it was like for Elly to be the mother of the groom, but this one was a lot more poignant since Elly is the mother of the bride here and I can imagine Mom doing some of the same things for our wedding that Elly did for Elizabeth's.


So I was all overwhelmed, and then I went online with my phone while Dave was shopping, and read this letter from Lynn on her site. She'd said in the strip that she was going to start over on Monday, and I was worried she was going to start completely over from scratch.

The letter said though that she is going to go back into the past again, and her old drawing style, and revisit the storyline from the beginning.
So that is way better almost - not only is she continuing, but she's continuing in the same style that Mom was familiar with when she was reading the strip and the cartoons!

So that made me feel a lot better. I posted on Lynn's site to thank her for all her work over the past 29 years and tell her a bit about how unexpectedly emotional (and then a relief) all this was.