Forgive me if a lot of this is repeated on the show tonight, some of it word-for-word. It's a little much to try to write this twice.

My mother never knew she had terminal cancer. After a lifetime of doctors' visits, she gave up on them three years ago and would not listen to arguments. Late in March, she fell getting out of bed, was taken to the hospital, and, when x-rayed, was found to have a large mass in her chest. Later examinations showed five lesions in her brain. There was nothing to be done but try to reduce her pain. Though it was inevitable and though in many respects it was a release for her, it still was exactly the kind of shock one would expect when she died, barely two weeks after she fell.

I did what a lot of us do in such circumstances: full speed ahead, with occasional hours or days off to go see her and my family. We had the Memorial on the 9th, with a plan to bring my sister and nephew down from their home upstate so he could see his first games at the new Yankee Stadium when his spring vacation began on the 18th. I put in for a long weekend so I could take him to the games on Saturday, Sunday, Monday night, Tuesday night, and Wednesday.

I went to the opener of the ballpark on the preceding Thursday (the 16th) and then went downtown to do the show. And somewhere during the day I hit an emotional wall about my mother's passing. So on short notice I asked my bosses to extend my long weekend from Saturday-Tuesday, to Friday-Tuesday, and they generously agreed. The 17th proved very therapeutic - saw the Yankees in the afternoon and the Mets at night.

Some people meditate; I go watch baseball.

I hit another kind of wall over the weekend and by Monday I was in bed with flu or something like it. Monday's game was rained out, much to my nephew's dismay, but the next night was the game in which a player's bat flew into the stands and he got to keep it (a player wearing the same number, oddly enough, that Chuck Knoblauch wore when his throw hit my mother in our seats at the ballpark back in 2000). By Wednesday morning I felt well enough to take him up for a matinee on a rainy day in the Bronx, and then return to the show.

I've gone into this in such excruciating detail because this afternoon I discovered this:

If you regularly tune in to Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, you may remember that Olbermann was mysteriously absent from the show for three days at the end of April. But Olbermann didn't just "have the night off," as David Shuster, his fill-in, said on the air three evenings in a row. According to a source inside MSNBC, it was a bizarre temper tantrum on Olbermann's part that led him to storm off the set in protest... Olbermann was not scheduled to take a vacation at the end of April. But he ended up missing three shows: Friday, April 17; Monday; April 20, and Tuesday, April 21.

This message from a parallel universe, posted by somebody named Remy Stern, went on to explain that I had had a fight with Rachel Maddow over the booking of Ben Affleck as a guest. In fact, Affleck had been tentatively booked for Countdown, then wound up on Rachel's show due to some really shoddy work by a fill-in publicist for his latest movie. This double-booking stuff happens; it was resolved internally and quickly, and the only thing it had to do with my weekend of mourning was that it happened more or less contemporaneously, if I remember correctly.

The irony in this is even the gossip guy recognizes that the story he's printing doesn't hold together.

The biggest question—and one no one can really answer except for Olbermann himself—is why having Ben Affleck on his show meant so much to him in the first place. The two have a past: Affleck spoofed the MSNBC host late last year, although Olbermann seemed to find the imitation flattering as you can see in this clip. It's much more likely that Affleck's role in this latest bit of drama didn't matter all that much, and this was just Olbermann attempting to once again force MSNBC to give in to his demands and satiate his ego. In which case, it was just another day at MSNBC.

Yeah, there's the problem with your pretend-reporting right there. It wasn't about Ben Affleck. My mother died.

Mr. Stern claims a reliable source, yet published before he could receive a denial which would have deflated most of his delusions, which are pretty standard stuff about me circa 2003. He also brings Dan Abrams into his epic, which from Mr. Stern's point of view is rather unfortunate because considering Mr. Abrams' irrelevance to the rest of the story, and indeed now to MSNBC, it does rather point a finger towards a small group that could be the "sources" of this sad, and sadly out-of-touch, gossip.

The site refused to remove the false story, refused to apologize for trodding on a weekend of mourning, refused to recognize its extraordinary failure and irresponsibility. It merely printed my protest, and then this really sad retort:

Our Response: We were saddened to hear of Olbermann's loss and found his tribute to his mother deeply moving. But if that was the reason Olbermann took time off two weeks later, we can't imagine why Olbermann wouldn't have simply said as much. Furthermore, we find it hard to believe one of his colleagues at MSNBC—a respected journalist, no less—would have attributed his absence to the "flu/allergy season" if Olbermann had made the perfectly understandable decision take (sic) a few days to mourn his mother's passing.

When didn't I say as much - and to whom? To "Cityfile"?

The journalist referred to, David Shuster, was told why I was out, and told I was also under the weather and my return might be Wednesday, might be Thursday, so he was on stand-by. He had to clear this with a gossip website before it decided whether or not it was believable?

This website has now called me a liar because I also went to ballgames after my mother died.

The first site to link off this crap and swallow it whole was, sadly, Wonkette. Advised of its mistake, its editor Ken Layne, who apparently does not understand that laughing all the time about everything is not wit, but more likely a serious medical condition, wrote:

Keith Olbermann Denies This One Particular Instance of Jackassery!... Whoo hoo, does this mean Wonkette is now "beneath contempt" in Keith Olbermann’s mind? Self-important much?

Yeah. My dead mother is, in fact, more important than your website.

Again, I'm sorry this has been in such detail. But I think it serves a purpose in reminding us about both the internet and (I know how strange this will sound) remembering the human equation, even in the heat of public discourse, which is why I objected on-air to Wanda Sykes' two jokes about Rush Limbaugh at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Political dispute is one thing. Let's leave everybody's kidneys, possible roles as the 20th 9/11 hijacker, and mothers out of it. In an irony of timing I was going to do the new WTF segment tonight on John McCain's mother's comments on The Tonight Show about Limbaugh and Steele and me, but as this nonsense broke around me this afternoon it struck me just how absurd that idea was. She was just a mother sticking up for her son. Good for you, Roberta. My Mom would've appreciated that

Finally, and just for the record, I also mysteriously took off on Monday May 4th, and was seen at the Yankees game that night with my friends Jason Bateman and David Cross. Stay tuned to "Cityfile" or "Wonkette": maybe I had had a fistfight with Brian Williams earlier in the day. Or, maybe I had gone to Westchester to place the urn containing my mother's ashes in her final resting place.

You know what they say: we report, you decide.