This will probably be the hardest blog post ever… All over the map… confusing and just plain sad. BUT- like a friend said… I am not alone and maybe my suffering and grief during this time will help someone else who is also struggling…

My mother. She could make me SO MAD. I mean really!! Really freaking pissed off , I’m telling you the truth. She was just plain sneaky I tell ya. If she wanted to know something or do something no one was stopping her. Not even the man who worshiped the ground she walked on. If she wanted it, she got it. She wasn’t scared to ask either. I was trying to see what the longest we had went without arguing was.. I would say maybe a couple months. Ohhhh how I wish she was hear to argue with me now! Even in death she was mad at me. Her last word to me was “jealous” with a slight roll of the eyes as she kissed my daddy. She was mad because I was talking to the doctors. Looking back I should have been talking to her… She knew that too. She waved bye to daddy and Shawn, my brother her last night on this earth. I even believe my brothers wife, Heather, got a kiss or wave. Not me though. She would look at me and close her eyes.. and I knew she was mad at me. I could feel it. She loved on daddy though. His last moments with her full of sweet kisses and I love you’s. Just as it should have been.

Yesterday, as we gathered pictures and tried to get to the magic number (35) something stood out to me about the pictures as I put them in order as best I could from mom being a baby to being a grandmother. I noticed how beautiful my mother truly was. Her smile seemed bigger than life itself in every picture. Her brown eyes twinkled and in one particular photo you couldn’t help but laugh with her. We were with her as kids growing up then we are all older. The “in between” seems to be missing… Maybe it was just the couple of decades that I see missing we didn’t have phones and still used disposable cameras. However, I know I missed allot of time with mom. She was always mad at me because she said I made her feel like I didn’t care. Or that my “other family” was more important. I did miss allot of holidays, surgeries, and different things like that.. Like she would always say “If it had been your daddy you’d been here” I couldn’t argue that. She knew that was true. It’s just that mom was strong, not saying daddy isn’t. She just WAS. She could do anything. She wasn’t sick, or hurting to me. She was strong and nothing would ever take her down. Until it did. Even when she got lung cancer, I wasn’t worried. I knew she would beat it. When she had her shoulder surgery I knew she would heal. When she got her pace maker, it would fix her. In a million years I never ever dreamed I would be writing this. That she would pass before my daddy. She would say “You better hope I go first” all the time. Like somehow she knew she would. Now I sit here regretting the last 40 years because I just wasn’t the daughter I should have been to her.

Mom was diagnosed on April 29th 2021 with brain cancer. June 28th 2021 she took her last breath.. and I wasn’t there. I spent the last 2 months making sure I was there for her and daddy. Somehow trying to make up for the things I wasn’t there for. We had some great talks, laughed, and held hands as we watched Thelma and Louise… Walking the Green Mile, getting a bath, eating, going to the doctors.. I was there. I was determined to be with her or be there when she passed. They told us it would take awhile when they gave her the morphine and took off the big breathing thingy. So I came home and got clothes and went to dads and got him clothes and his meds and headed back to the hospital. When I saw the text “Where are you” I knew… I arrived and saw my brother and Heather in the hall. I knew.. I went in her room.. I lost it. I wasn’t there, again.

If you know me you know I will carry this burden forever. I will also carry the last 2 months in my heart to help me. I jeopardized everything to stay close to her and help as much as I could. My job, my family, my life. Everything. Luckily, my boss is a great understanding man and my family loves me and continues to support me. My mom came 1st and I put her care before everything else when she was diagnosed. I knew this time, she would not beat this. I felt it in my bones. I even told my husband she wouldn’t make it through July.. I just knew it.

All the time in between my mom starting her own family until the day she died is filled with love, laugher, tears, pain, joy, and heartbreak. We may not have pictures of that but we have memories. I made some wonderful memories with my mom. Showers will never be that same as she soaked me when I bathed her. 5037 has a new meaning as well as e-e-e, 3 e’s. “Say it and it will be” I have so many recordings of our conversations… Videos to watch her.. and I will treasure them forever.

I am struggling with who I call now.. A friend sent a text and used the work “orphaned”. It seems fitting.. When my mom was sick I longed to be able to call my aunt or sister for advise.. Now who do I call? All the women in my immediate family are gone. My daughter is 12 and I am raising her without her biological father. That sucks. Also and entirely different blog post. However, I am going to NEED them.. my aunt was the comforting and encouraging one, my sister was the “put your big girl pantie’s on and handle it” one and my mom was all of these plus..MOM.