It has been on my mind for some time .Thanksgiving 2016 was the last time I saw my mom when she was purportedly healthy. Of course, none of us knew she was hiding knowledge of her true condition, that her cancer had resurfaced. But I didn’t suspect. Should I have had an inkling? Perhaps I should have noticed she didn’t have the same levity, spring in her step, fortitude, go with the flow type of attitude. She ambulated fine for someone who’d had some numbness in a foot and leg. Todd & I both commented on how well she appeared. But she seemed a bit off when the group of us went to Monk’s BBQ for lunch, followed by tastings at two wineries the day after Thanksgiving. She’d always loved our wine tasting expeditions. She seemed a bit tired, but I attributed that to the rounds of radiation she’d recently completed. She told all of us she was cured.
It was odd that she declined to buy a top she really liked at Talbots when we went shopping with my mother-in-law on Black Friday. She complimented me on my hair, encouraged me to buy a navy pin dot pantsuit and dissuaded me from a pair of houndstooth trousers. She tried on nothing.But it didn’t send a signal to my brain. It never occurred to me that within 5 weeks she would be gone.
I wish I’d taken more photographs. I wish I’d hugged her more and harder. I wish I had known this would be the last time we would celebrate a holiday together. Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday because of the focus on family and gratitude. The tears still spill from my eyes at odd moments. I grasp onto the belief that whenever I find a shiny penny in an odd place that it is a message from Mom, telling me she is with me in spirit as an angel looking over me. I wasn’t ready to lose her. I thought she would live to 100, like Todd’s grandmother, a stoic, midwestern women who could not be defeated by mere health issues. She never considered herself old. Neither did we.
The milestones throughout the year have passed with some sadness; but this holiday is the one that Todd and I always hosted for our extended families. We celebrated the opportunity to have our loved ones travel to Virginia and allow us to cook for them, coddle them, treat them, and thank them for all they have done for us. They raised us to be good people and we celebrate them for that.
This year it will be different. There will be a hole in our hearts. But my father, brother, father in law and mother in law will join us and we will celebrate that we still have one another. We have some other Indiana refugees that will join us to give thanks for our blessings. I am filled with gratitude for my incomparable husband, my ever thriving dad, my resilient brother, and my wonderfully loving in-laws. I know that with our friend and family joining us we will weather the storm.
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