Mom

On September 24th, my mom died.

This is the post I have struggled to write. My sister wrote a rather gorgeous obituary and I gave a eulogy at her funeral, but here? I don't know where to start. Still, some part of me wants to try, to get it out there for posterity. Perhaps it's just time to go at it from a different angle.

Mom had been fighting cancer for six years. 

Growing up, she'd seemed nigh invincible — energetic, intelligent, talented. Nothing slowed her down, not even three kids. She was endlessly capable, it seemed, and it was strange enough to look back and realize she'd aged along with me. As I'd gotten older I'd come to realize what she'd been up against when I was a teenager (like my weird moods mixed with her upbringing telling her I'd get over it) and that she was, ultimately, another adult trying to make it in the world. We developed a normal adult friendship; we had real conversations, I tagged along with her hiking group when I could, we had lunch almost every week starting in 2012, and we developed an approach to large family gatherings that made us the Kitchen Dynamic Duo. She was Mom 2.0, the still-invincible woman that I could now just hang out with.

Then the cancer started. As far as my eyes could see, she was still ... Mom. Her personality didn't
change even if her body occasionally let her down. And heck. The first round of cancer? Beaten down. Mom hardly even seemed to have side effects to the poison she was taking to make that happen. Run down a little, but still hiking, still cooking massive meals for family gatherings, still packing up everything they owned to move to a new house. Big things, small things, normal things, with an "oh, and treatment this week" mentality. She went into remission with a list of things that were now being watched but life largely returned to the way it was before.

When the cancer poked back up the following year (now in her lungs) I think we all kind of accepted — on paper — that this was going to be The Thing That Did It. Still, there was no real timeline. Yeah, she'd probably be on chemo to some degree for the rest of her life, but the way she had handled chemo so far it didn't seem like the worst possible thing.

So it became part of life. For another four years, it was ... normal. Treatments changed, symptoms changed. She did lose her hair — around Treatment Course #3 — but it grew back thicker and darker and annoyed the daylights out of her. She had another round that robbed some of that endless energy, followed by another that was ... fine.

It was a roller coaster but it was also Just Life.

Granddaughters were born and Mom spent as much time as she could with them. She started to lean on me a bit more for those large family gatherings. And can I say it again? This continued for multiple years.

It was just. the way. life. was.

Until this past summer. Looking back, I can see Mom hitting the brakes. Her energy plummeted. Compromises were made on unexpected things. The newest treatment didn't seem to be helping.

I now know there were things going on that she did not want to tell us. She was truly tired. More tumors had grown and were interrupting her body's ability to do normal things, like metabolize food. Her lungs were damaged. She wasn't hungry and she lost her temper with grandkids. She was no longer herself.

And then in September, she landed in the hospital. A week later, she was gone.

In the end, a tumor collapsed one lung and her body could not recover. Truly, the cancer itself reached up and killed her. Not pneumonia, not a weakened immune system — the cancer had to do its own dirty work.

There is still an unreality to it all. I still walk into the house and half-expect her to say hi. I have a hard time looking at the corner of the couch where she sat the week I stayed there after my stroke. And I still reach for my phone when I'm thinking about what we should do for Christmas dinner.
It's not impossible to get through. There are lots of happy memories and we are surrounded by great people, but you know what? It still sucks.

Miss you, Mom. We all miss you, in ways I don't think we can even identify yet.