Rapidly Approaching the new year...

Christmas is passed and I hate to say this but I barely noticed. Tom and I had such great plans for it this year. This was to be our first Christmas that the kids were not with us. It was morbidly depressing until we realized that all of those things we wanted to do when we were younger, like going for a carriage ride through a quaint Christmas town and stopping by a pub to take the chill off of our noses were possible again. Then my mother was hospitalized for kidney failure on the 22nd and after the CAT scans it was discovered that the cause of the kidney failure was terminal lymphatic cancer that filled her belly and cut off her kidneys.

Kind of put a damper on the whole old Christmas Spirit ...

So, on Christmas day, Tom was in New Jersey and I was in Delaware.

I learned something from this Christmas, though, especially about giving. I really was stumped about what to take my mom for Christmas, so I finally decided to take her the one thing I knew she would eat no matter what...glazed donuts. Watching both of my parents as my mother scarfed down her glazed donut was worth ever Christmas present I ever screwed up on because it was one of the last pleasures in life she is ever going to have and those moments of sitting there and chatting with her about crabbing on the Chessapeak Bay and all of the boating we did when I was a kid while she ate that stupid donut were worth traveling to the moon for if I had to.

My mom is passing right now between here and the next place. It could be a horrible thing, and it is for my father, but to me, dying is a lot like being born. For me, it's a passage, not an ending. My goal in all of this is to give Mom the best quality of time that I can. She doesn't always know who I am. She doesn't always hear what I'm saying or understand, but I'm pretty sure that she knows that I love her and that's why I'm there. In the end, I think that's probably all that is going to matter.

I'm going to miss her when she passes. God, how I'm going to miss her, but I know she's going to be watching me. I also know that she won't be in the pain she is beginning to pass through and her mind and body will be restored to her. For that I am thankful because she doesn't know what is happening now.

My greatest prayer in this is that I am with her in the end to pray because my father's parting gift to her is to keep her ignorant of her condition. In short, she will not be able to prepare herself spiritually for this passage. For him, it's an act of love. To me, it makes a hard thing all the more difficult because she knows something is happening but not what.

And today on the phone when I told her I had made it home okay she wanted to know all about the flower pots...

There weren't any flower pots. She was in a different place.

The Writer...and her dog, Bear