Six Years Ago

Six years ago last night, at about 11:55 p.m., I was woken up to the phone ringing. It was the pastor (or reverend or whatever he was called) from the nursing home where my Mom was living, telling me that she had died. This wasn't unexpected, because she had brain tumors and she had slipped out of consciousness, so we knew it was coming - otherwise my phone would have been downstairs, instead of upstairs on my end table. I held it together long enough to call my sister and tell her (actually, I spoke to her husband), and then my oldest brother, and when I hung up, I remember doubling over like someone had just stabbed me in the gut. About ten minutes later, my sister and her husband, and my oldest brother and his daughter, showed up at my house, because I was alone and they didn't want me to be. To this day, that remains the one thing that they have done that I will always remember. They didn't let me be alone on the night our mother died.

That whole next week was seven kinds of hell, from going to the funeral home and talking about the service and the casket and the whole arrangment deal, to the days between then and the actual funeral to, of course, the funeral itself on Thursday, followed by the internment of her ashes (she wanted to be cremated, and had picked out her urn herself - a green marble one) on Friday. She died on a Saturday night, and that hellish week lasted until Friday. I don't know how I made it through.

Also, the Sunday after she died was Easter, so you can imagine the rotten associations I had with that day for a while. But Easter moves around every year, and even though the 22nd was again on a Saturday this year, Easter was the week before. So I have mostly lost my bad associations with the holiday. I can go to my sister's house for dinner now without feeling like I need to hide in my house and grieve instead, so that's good.

Anyway, it's the first thing in the morning and I'm writing this before I'm fully awake, which is not a good thing, so I'm just going to wrap it up here and say: I love you Mom. I think about you every single day of my life, and although the pain finally lessened enough where I can live with your loss, there isn't a moment that goes by that I don't wish my phone could ring with you on the other end, or that I could go pick you up on a Saturday, like I used to, and bring you home to spend the day with me. You were my mother and my best friend, and I feel your loss always.

And since I don't have a more recent picture of her in electronic form, here is her graduation picture, which you already saw on her birthday.