20 years

Twenty years ago today my mother died of leukemia, only three months after her diagnosis.  She spent one month in the hospital undergoing chemo, but the doctor didn't give us much hope.  Then she went home, with regular visits from hospice caregivers until her last day when she returned to the hospital and died surrounded by family singing the old hymns.  Not me, though.  I had visited the previous week, and though we could tell she was slipping away we didn't know how long it might be.  So on Friday Randy and I returned to Alameda, where our girls were staying with friends; Mom did not want them to see her and then remember her as sick.  Then on Sunday Mom died.  I went back to Illinois for the funeral and returned home on Mother's Day.  As you can imagine, this time of year evokes introspection.  (Both of Randy's paternal grandparents and Mom died within a six-week span that spring.)

Did we have a smooth relationship?  It was OK, not perfect.  What child doesn't have an issue or two with her mother?  There was one thing in particular I wanted to talk to her about, but I kept putting it off, and once she was sick I just couldn't bring myself to do it.  So regret lives in my soul.

Our daughters were 13, 11 and 7 at the time.  Randy's mom had already died, in 1985, of cancer; neither older girl remembered her.  Our parents all lived in the same town (more or less) which was convenient, but because we lived some 2200 miles away the girls didn't see their grandparents often.  Generally we'd fly out every couple of years, and grandparents would come here in alternate years.  But it was not at all the same as when we were growing up, just a short distance from grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins.

This is one reason I am here in Phoenix.  I want to interact with e, with her parents.  Mom died at 65; I will turn 65 in September, if nothing unexpected happens.  She had just retired and had plans for her free time.  I know that nothing is certain.  This sentence from Elizabeth Strout's The Burgess Boys struck me:  "No one wants to believe something is too late, but it is always becoming too late, and then it is."  From another book I've read this spring:  "Life is never as long as we want it to be, and wasted time can never be recovered."

Carpe diem.