Days 75-78: Moments

Whew...nearly an entire week with no blog post. It has been a BUSY week here. We're all still getting over this stupid head cold, which has no turned into a chest cold for most of us. Lots of coughing and scratchy voices. Yuk.

But we also had some incredible weather here this week. Yesterday was well into the 90s. Crazy for early June here. A a little too hot for this native NWesterner. My webbed feet start drying out at 85 degrees. LOL!

Nonetheless, we felt like we really needed to take advantage of the weather this week and did spend a couple of mornings at the beach. The boys could spend hours throwing rocks into the water. And the water always calms me and gives me time for reflection.

I find myself living my normal life these days, but in sort of a parallel universe. A universe where my mom still has cancer. A universe where every day when I call my parents I wonder if something will have changed to signify that the cancer is taking over. These thoughts permeate nearly everything I do. Yet, when people ask me how my mom is doing, all I can really say is that she's doing remarkably well. I've had a lot of people ask me recently and when I answer, they have all told me how happy that makes them and that they've been praying for my mom. Wow...that's a lot of prayers for my mom. People who have never met her are praying for her. I know that I have friends and acquaintances who are praying. I know my brother does as well and other family members and friends of those friends who maybe we don't even know. And then I can't help but think...did God listen? Did he decide that my mom needed to be here more than he needed her in heaven. Could that be? Or maybe he answered by simply giving us more time for goodbyes.

I've been thinking about that a lot lately too. The title of this blog is Finding My Mom in Small Goodbyes. And yet, now, I don't want to say goodbye. I don't have the "big" conversations with my parents anymore. And maybe we still should, but I think we're all so much happier living in the world we're living in right now. The world where there is still a hospital bed in my parents' living room, but it's just currently another piece of furniture to sit on.

So, I talk to my parents twice a day. They always put me on speaker phone. And there's never a lot of exciting stuff to talk about. I think that's a good thing. We talk about our days and our plans and random stuff, but perhaps each one of those conversations is a small goodbye in itself. Before mom got sick, I talked to her mainly by e-mail. Our relationship had been strained since my divorce and instead of working through it, we just kind of kept things where they were. I really hate the fact that it took a terminal disease for my mom and I to talk again. But, at the same time, I'm grateful that we have this time. My mom always talked about losing her mom suddenly and how much it threw her. There was so much left unsaid, so much unresolved. I've worried about that my whole life and yet, had mom died quickly, I would have had the same fate. I do feel I've been given the gift of resolution with this time we've been given. I imagine I'll talk to my mom every morning and every evening for possibly the remainder of her life.

Sometimes we talk about funny things like this morning when I asked her how she kept Michael in shoes while he was growing up. He has two different sized feet, and so does Jonathan and I've found it quite a challenge buying reasonably priced shoes that somehow fit both his feet. So, we talked about how she dealt with that when we were kids. We talk about random stuff like that fairly often and I guess that's a small glimpse into my history. And when we talked about the shoes this morning, I had this moment of realizing that some day I won't have her around to ask all those questions. And that hit me kind of hard. 6 months ago, I never would have thought about a question like that. It wasn't a concern of mine. I'm going to have lots of new stuff come up as my kids get older, and I'm not going to have my mom to talk to about them. I hate that.

Yet, sometimes it's hard to talk to her even now. Her memory is still pretty bad and she has a hard time coming up with words too. She and dad seem a lot older to me than they did a couple of months ago. But maybe I just didn't notice them aging because I didn't want to. I see it now. I hear it in their voices. And sometimes I get off the phone and just sit in silence reflecting on all of this.

And then there are still the random moments when I find myself in tears out of no where. The boys I went shopping for birthday cards for my mom. I asked Jonathan to see if he could find one from he and his brother. He picked through a couple of cards and then handed one to me. I read it out loud so Christopher could hear it and see if he liked it. It's a short card, but as I got towards the end, my eyes welled up, my throat tightened and I had to take a breath. There was a woman re-stocking cards and out of the corner of my eye I could see her looking at us. I pulled myself together and finished the card and told Jonathan that it was lovely. Both of the boys looked at me and asked me what was wrong. And all I could tell them was that I didn't expect to be buying birthday cards for my mom this year and it made me a little more emotional than I expected.

The boys have been so good about all of this. They've seen their mom much more emotional than even usual. And they have been supportive and understanding...especially when I was hauling them up north once or twice a week. They've really been incredible and they really seem to understand what I'm feeling and can somehow empathize...even at their age. I'm blessed to have them.

Before ending this...a quick update on dad's visit with his Neurologist. Seems that everything is okay. He did say that stress can cause an increase in symptoms, but now that dad's stress level has decreased a bit, he seems to be stable, so that's a good thing as well!

And this weekend we celebrate mom's birthday. That is a VERY good thing! It will be a simple celebration, but yet a really wonderful one and one that we didn't expect to be having.

78 days ago, my mom was given 3 months to live. A month later, it seemed that it might be over already. But today is the day before her birthday and she is living. Really living. And that is definitely cause for celebration!