Yesterday was the anniversary of my mother’s death. She died on May 7, 1991 at the age of fifty-seven. I will be fifty-seven next year. I will breathe a sigh of relief when I turn fifty-eight. There will be something to surviving my fifty-seventh year. I’m not normally superstitious, but I’ll admit – fifty-seven freaks me out a bit.
I am so young (I think I am!) and healthy (my doctor says I am!). I’m sure my mother felt the same. What am I doing to protect myself from the perils of fifty-seven? I quit smoking on the day my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. Cold turkey. Watching your mother waste away in M.D. Anderson Hospital is the best cure for kicking the smoking habit I’ve found. Forget the patch, I’ve discovered a better way. My husband quit with me. (He also stopped riding his motorcycle after my brother died in a motorcycle accident, but that’s another story.) I see my doctor regularly, not waiting and worrying, and putting it off like mother did. How long did she have the big C before she sought medical treatment? Her last excuse was she didn’t want to ruin Christmas. She went to the doctor after the first of January and was dead by May 7th. Four months of hell.
Perhaps she knew and was afraid to face it. Of course she knew. Part of me wants to be mad at her. Mad at her for leaving me, leaving my daughters, leaving my father, my siblings, my nieces and nephews, the great-grandchildren she would one day have. But you can’t get mad at my mother; she was too nice, too kind, too gentle.
She shouldn’t have smoked. She began at an impossibly young age and smoked a lot, refusing to believe the Surgeon General’s warning applied to her. Doctors used to say it was good for you to smoke. She even switched to menthol cigarettes when she had a cold or a sore throat. She said the menthol was soothing.
She was a nicotine addict. She was fifty-seven. She was my mother. I miss her.
I’ll be fifty-seven next year.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Monday, May 7, 2012
Sight
It doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Big Red restored my vision; she’s been helping me to see for a long time.
On what would have been her 105th birthday my Uncle Steve, the executor of her estate, made a cash distribution to her heirs. We were all grateful and surprised by the unexpected gift. On a family e-mail several of my cousins, aunts and uncles commented on what they were going to do with the boon. There was talk of reupholstering dining room chairs and buying new shoes. I put my check in the bank. I felt that my always frugal grandmother would have approved.
Right about this time I found out I needed cataract surgery. Health insurance covers the procedure, but not the new corrective lenses that would give me twenty-twenty vision, something I have not had since I was nine years old. What to do? I didn’t have several thousand dollars just sitting around the house, but I did have my benefaction from Big Red. Thinking about using her money to restore my vision brought back a memory and made me smile.
When I first went to live with her in my junior year of college I was wearing the old-fashioned hard contact lenses. Wearing them was like putting a plastic tiddlywink in one’s eye. Soft contacts had recently come on the market, but were cost prohibitive for me trying to finish school on a budget. After yet another day spent in a dark room with a cold wash cloth over my eyes suffering from a scratched cornea courtesy of the hard lenses Big Red announced she was buying me a pair of soft lenses.
“I promised the Lord that if I won at Bingo I’d give the money to charity and I think your eyes are a good charity,” she said after winning $1,000 the night before at the church hall.
I took her up on her offer. Little did I know that was just the beginning of gaining sight from my beloved grandmother. Over the next thirty-plus years she taught me how to look at the world. I learned to see my life, my home, my family, my friends, my career as she would have seen them. I’ve asked myself on many an occasion, how would Big Red do this, handle this, react to this. I became a better person by examining things through her eyes.
She is gone, but she is still giving me sight – both literally and figuratively. I now have twenty-twenty vision afforded because of her monetary legacy and I have the gift of her love and her example for how to live my life. Sight is a wonderful thing.
On what would have been her 105th birthday my Uncle Steve, the executor of her estate, made a cash distribution to her heirs. We were all grateful and surprised by the unexpected gift. On a family e-mail several of my cousins, aunts and uncles commented on what they were going to do with the boon. There was talk of reupholstering dining room chairs and buying new shoes. I put my check in the bank. I felt that my always frugal grandmother would have approved.
Right about this time I found out I needed cataract surgery. Health insurance covers the procedure, but not the new corrective lenses that would give me twenty-twenty vision, something I have not had since I was nine years old. What to do? I didn’t have several thousand dollars just sitting around the house, but I did have my benefaction from Big Red. Thinking about using her money to restore my vision brought back a memory and made me smile.
When I first went to live with her in my junior year of college I was wearing the old-fashioned hard contact lenses. Wearing them was like putting a plastic tiddlywink in one’s eye. Soft contacts had recently come on the market, but were cost prohibitive for me trying to finish school on a budget. After yet another day spent in a dark room with a cold wash cloth over my eyes suffering from a scratched cornea courtesy of the hard lenses Big Red announced she was buying me a pair of soft lenses.
“I promised the Lord that if I won at Bingo I’d give the money to charity and I think your eyes are a good charity,” she said after winning $1,000 the night before at the church hall.
I took her up on her offer. Little did I know that was just the beginning of gaining sight from my beloved grandmother. Over the next thirty-plus years she taught me how to look at the world. I learned to see my life, my home, my family, my friends, my career as she would have seen them. I’ve asked myself on many an occasion, how would Big Red do this, handle this, react to this. I became a better person by examining things through her eyes.
She is gone, but she is still giving me sight – both literally and figuratively. I now have twenty-twenty vision afforded because of her monetary legacy and I have the gift of her love and her example for how to live my life. Sight is a wonderful thing.
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