Five Years and Counting: I Still Miss Her
My husband and I will be leaving shortly on a new travel experience: a cruise. We’ll fly to Fort Lauderdale. When the ship leaves port, we’ll head to Key West, then St. Thomas, and finally Half Moon Cay. At each port of call we registered for snorkeling experiences.
Excited? Yup.
Apprehensive? Yup.
I inherited my love of travel and adventure from my parents and grandparents. I loved the slide presentations my grandfather shared. I remember my uncle’s slides from their three year missionary experience in Tanzania. I love pouring through my parent’s trip photo albums that I inherited.
The winter of 2013 found my mother embarking on another adventure. This time, she head to the Galapagos Islands to visit “her” tortoises. The previous November (2012), she visited our “family” on Easter Island. In other travels, she had made friends with the penguins of South America, held a koala in Australia, and ridden a camel. She never turned down an experience.
In the Galapagos, she boarded the ponga boats and hiked some of the nature trails. At 83 years young, she often traveled alone, but in doing so, she met and made numerous friends all around the world.
In the spring of 2013, she took up Zumba. AT 83! She found Zumba fun, but she discovered she had difficulty breathing. She had suffered with allergies and asthma most of her life so she gave it no mind. In fact, it was so bad when she was a kid that her parents sent her to Duluth, Minnesota, for the summer to stay with family. For some reason, the weather and pollens in Duluth didn’t affect her allergies like those in Northern Illinois.
Her Zumba friends, however, finally convinced her to see her doctor.
On June 10, days before her appointment, she called me to take her to the emergency room. Her difficulty breathing finally alarmed her.
Worried about pneumonia, the ER doctors x-rayed her lungs, but they found them clear. In examining the x-ray, however, they found some suspicious indications. The release orders? Follow up with your doctor, and they released her that night with a prescription for an inhaler.
In the follow-up appointments, her doctor talked about stage three or stage four pancreatic cancer. It would take an exploratory surgery to determine the extent of the cancer and the plan of care. He talked about removing what he could of the cancer. In the end, the cancer had become so wide spread that it was impossible to remove anything. She was given sixth months to maybe a year.
In the end, the chemo and cancer had weakened her heart and she passed away from a heart attack on August 10, 2013.
As a child, I had been a handful. It never failed, to hear her talk, that Sunday mornings at church members of the congregation would ask what I had done that week. From illnesses to mischievousness, I kept her running.
As a teenager, we butted heads as I searched for my identity and independence. But she also supported my passions: she attended my concerts and theater productions; she read my papers for school and helped me study for tests; and she rooted for me in everything I did.
As an adult, we butted heads as I attempted to raise my children, but I soon found myself calling for her insight and expertise or just to talk and tell stories.
In the years before she was diagnosed with this bout cancer, we had been working to record her life stories and the family stories. After the diagnosis, she was emphatic about sitting together for hours each day to go through things in her home. Did I know this? Did I realize what this was? I am so glad to have had those 60 days with her.
She looked at everything, even after the diagnosis, positively. If she lost her hair from the chemo, she planned to wear one of those multi-colored curly clown wigs. And she would have been able to pull it off.
She didn’t dwell on the length of time she had been given. It was her philosophy that knowing the end of her life was near, she had time to say her farewells with people. She had one last chance to impact people’s lives.
At her funeral, people told me how great a person my mother was. Even today, I am still learning about my mother. In my prayers, I hope to be half the person I knew, and learned, my mother to be. She expected her funeral to be a celebration of her life. That no one grieve because she had lived a long, full life.
It’s been five years and five months since she passed. I find myself wondering what she thinks about what I’ve been doing: my violin playing, my writing, my traveling, and my passion to empower women to be the best they can be. I find myself wanting to call her (I still have her number plugged into the contacts on my phone) and ask her opinion and insight.
I now find, however, that I am her. I am the one my children call when they need to talk. I am the one who is trying to help people. I am now, as my cousin pointed out at her mother’s funeral, one of the elders of the family.
Rebecca (Becky) spent 34 years in a teaching career, but when she retired in 2014, she picked up her pen and pursued her passion to write. As a high school English teacher, Becky held the philosophy that she wouldn’t give any writing assignment that she personally wouldn’t or couldn’t do. That philosophy strengthened and broadened her own writing.
In addition to publishing her writing on various platforms, Becky also blogs at Life is for Living, a blog to encourage, motivate, and help others live the best life possible. As an extension of Life is for Living, she also publishes a weekly newsletter, Let’s Chat. (Check it out HERE.) Life is for Living also has a social media presence with the group Coffee on my Porch. (Check it out HERE.)
After teaching writing for 34 years, Becky began Ink & Keyboard, a blog for writers at all levels. She supplements what she writes on the blog with a subscription newsletter, The Writer’s Notebook (Check it out HERE.) and the social media group Ink & Keyboard (Check it out HERE.)