Counting the days

It seems almost impossible, I know, that pretty much all of a year has passed since my Mom died. I managed to save all the entries I'd written during her illness from last year and everyday I check in to see what I wrote, what new horrible thing was happening to her and to see if I had any hint at how short the days were really becoming. Tomorrow will be what I consider the beginning of the very fast slide out of this world for her. She'd already been diagnosed with tumor metastasis to her brain and we'd been doing a week of radiation to her hip for possible bone mets when she seized up in her chair that afternoon during an episode of "M*A*S*H" in front me and my brother Matt and his family. This is what I wrote last year:

"I don't think I can imagine witnessing one single worse acute event other than a grand mal seizure. A full out body-rattling, electrical storm that winds the muscles of the body so tight in constrictures you'd think you could just about hear bones getting ready to crack, not to mention the complete look of utter horror in their face with the eyes rolled back and the mouth drawn up into some wicked, maniacal grimace of what looks to be mind-blowing pain. I've had years of experiences with seizure patients and at first, it's one of those episodes which causes you to lose complete control of yourself and start yelling for someone to do something, anything, just to make it stop. That's the very problem with seizures: they are completely, utterly unstoppable once they start up and there is nothing you can do about it. They run their course and you're left standing by the wayside, watching. In the ER, we'd roll the patient to the side in case they started to vomit so they didn't aspirate and choke and we'd give them some meds, put them on some oxygen which is all secondary symptomatic treatment and not doing anything to limit the seizure time. You just learn to not panic and realize you have to ride out the storm, hard as it may be.

I say all this for this reason; I know anyone and everyone who's following this whole thing has been thinking and praying and hoping for whatever is appropriate to hope for in this situation. I'm telling this to show the story moves on. This is where we are now and we move forward, quicker than I thought. It's hard to explain but my new mantra for each day, to make each day count is "time grows short" and I can manage with that.

As it turns out, we had less than two weeks left which even then and now looking back was a blessing. She was literally well and walking one week, wheel-chair bound the next and dead two weeks later. That's a slicked down slide if I've ever heard one. By this time last year, I'd already painted her bedroom a strangely comforting but saddenly infuriating shade of lilac and lavender. I'd scrubbed her floors by hand with a brush almost every day and I'd baked what was probably my 15th or 16th loaf of bread because I was so powerless to do anything else.

It's a cliché to say how the time has flown over the last year but I can say, more truthfully than ever before, that's exactly the whole of it. The days simply melted away without her and now we're circling her death's year-anniversary. It's been a year that has been gearing up for me to get back up and start doing again so that's what I'm into. Her estate is coming to a close, finally, and her grave stone is ordered and should be ready in May and those were the last things I'd been holding onto not really wanting to let them go but knowing sometimes, you just have to call it a day and make do. And there is some REALLY good family news coming down the pike which makes the timing seem on the sweeter end but still bittersweet, none-the-less along with the day to day fizz of all of us waking up and shaking off the long, cold winter. Spring is coming, things get green, the world turns like always.