Today was that day

My mother died 2 years ago.    She died 9 months after the last radiation treatment.   14 months after the double mastectomy.   21 months after she found the lump.   

She became a single mother when I was 10, worked full time, raised two kids and did the best she could.   As a mother, she was loving and kind and always our biggest fan.   She bought me super girl t-shirts and Wonder Woman knick knacks throughout my life and I know that’s because that’s how she saw me.   Capable of anything. 

She always took an interest in whatever we were interested in.  There can be no other explanation for her interest in fish when my brother got a giant fish tank or the number of times we spent our summer vacation at a professional football training camp even though she had no interest in football.  We went on adventures to the World Figure Skating Championships, romance novel conventions and Graceland.   She was up for anything and just happy to be there with us.  

She was an avid reader, watched The Young and the Restless every day and loved shopping online for things she was convinced I needed.   She thought getting her fingernails painted was a big treat, her favorite ice cream was butter pecan and she loved these stupid Maple Cream Eggs at Easter that they only sold at Walgreens.  She loved chocolate, Orange Crush soda with a bowl of popcorn and a good steak.  She thought Tina Turner was a tough chick, Tom Select was handsome and Joan Rivers was funny.   She was stubborn but sweet.   Frugal but generous.  Feisty but funny.    She weathered many health issues over the course of her life.   Too many to name.  But she survived cancer and chemo two times.   The third time she didn’t.

She was 70 years old when she died.    

She died on a Tuesday.   The service was on Friday and I went back to work on Monday.   She was cremated and her ashes will be buried under a tree someday when I’m ready.  I think she’ll like that.   I  think she’d like the shade it would provide.   She’d like the strong limbs to hold a swing for a kid.   And she’d like for me to have a place to go to sit and talk to her.   Because there are many things about losing her that are difficult but losing my best friend is by far the hardest.   I talked to her every day for as long as I could remember.   And now I don’t.   No one could ever find the mundane details of my life so interesting.   No one’s voice was such a calm and fortifying force on my difficult days.   I’m thankful to have had that for as long as I did.   She was kind and sweet and the world is a little less sweet without her.   Or at least I know my world is.  

She lived with me for almost 10 years before her death.   But even before that, I spent most of my life taking care of her in one way or another.   Sometimes it almost feels like losing a child.  Except with children you had a life before they arrived.    You can remember a life before them even though the memories are distant and fuzzy.     But in this case, there was no before.    There had always been her.   Except now there isn’t.  

It's been a hard two years.   There hasn’t been one day that’s gone by without me thinking of her.  

I stopped writing on my blog right around the time she found the lump.   Looking back I know that wasn’t a coincidence.    All my words were gone.   And I had no courage to try to look for them.   It was enough to just get up in the morning.    

But that can’t be enough forever.   And eventually you realize the words are there again.   And then one day you find the courage to say them.

I didn’t know it when I woke up this morning.  But turns out today was that day.     

And it feels a little like finding an old friend that you missed.   Or maybe I’m just finding myself again.  Or maybe I'm just finding myself period.

I found this photo of my mother last year and couldn't get over how much she looked like me.   I'd never once thought that before.   And that was the first time since her death that I genuinely felt like she'd always be with me.