Mom

I got a message from a friend whose husband has cancer. He is not feeling the best. She talked about how supportive and wonderful her kids and granddaughter have been. That message got me to thinking about mom which got me to writing this -

It’s a sad irony of life that we rarely appreciate what we have until it’s taken from us.

“You can see her now,” the nurse said. Those were the words that signalled that my mom was going to be taken from me.
I was the last to walk in. Part of me still wishes I had not taken a single step.

Seeing my mother in the bed at Altru levelled me. Time had suddenly pulled a cruel joke on my family, and my mother was the butt of it. It’s almost three years since that moment, but the details and images, and pain, come back instantly.

Gone were her gentle hands I knew as a child when I’d sit in the sink and relish her touch as she bathed me. Gone was her auburn hair I knew as a boy when I scaled the isles in Hart’z grocery and peered for her. Gone were her strong arms I knew as a teenager when I fed the sheep and she helped me break apart the bales. Gone was the delight in her eyes I knew as a young man when I told her about my days teaching and watched her chuckle. God, what I wouldn’t give just to be able to travel back in time to re-experience one of those moments again.

Instead I saw clearly her course hands curled into wrinkled claws, slender arms with bulging veins underneath flesh the color of old paper, murky eyes half open and drowsy from anesthesia.

My mom had suddenly become old. In that instant, I no longer saw my mother as I had as a child, but as an old woman.
Squamous cell carcinoma, foreign but sinister, sounded in my head as I chewed the inside of my bottom lip until I tasted pennies.

More unfamiliar and malevolent terms, chemo, morphine, radiation, biopsy, began to trample through my mind.

My mom’s hoarse voice spoke the only familiar words. Unfortunately, they were words that would signal her death, 465 days later.

“Kurt, it’s cancer.”

There is nothing that can prepare anyone for that. When I heard those words come from Mom, I knew that I had to savor every moment I had with her. Now that sounds now like some corny cliche, but it’s not.

I think of a close friend whose Mom suddenly died during surgery. How horrible that must have been for him. What were his last words to her? I’m sure he never thought that those words would really be his final words to her. Did he make it memorable and vital to him? Or did he just slack it off?

In a sad way, my mom’s impending death brought us closer as a family. No excuses were tolerated, or even given, for being absent for Christmases, birthday parties, anniversaries, graduations, and other things. We stopped taking each other for granted because the point was driven home to us, first by the news that mom had cancer, then by the wig she got after chemo and radiation treatments made her hair fall out in clumps, then after we saw her carrying around her oxygen tank, which she kept in a backpack on her side, and then finally stopping by the hospital each day to see her as her emphazima, a complication of the cancer, began to squeeze the life out of her lungs.

Now when Koko, my fiance’s daughter, wants me to play Phase 10 with her or watch a “Seinfeld,” when I really want to just watch a football game, I go do it. That’s what my mom would have done for me. Everything is precious. Thirty two years from now Koko might look back at our time together as one of those moments I would give so much to relive with my mom.

Everything is indeed precious.