perfect moment: time

Just before our daughter was born — before she was ours — my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer. My 40th birthday was days away. The baby we had been asked to parent was due at the end of the month. Just as I myself was (maybe) about to become a mother — after trying to build our family for seven years — I learned that I would soon lose my own mother, in the same awful way I had lost my father and grandmother.

Six months later — one year ago this week — my mom was discharged from a world class hospital after one last desperate effort to improve the quality of her remaining life, though the procedure alone could have easily killed her.

Since then I’ve visited her about every three months, watching her progression from death’s door and back to the living, including a family reunion that no one thought she’d live to see.

I never had the chance to write about our last visit in October. On one hand it was good to see her get out more than before, but I also noted the deterioration since July, particularly with drastic weight loss. She was now having her hair done again, yet she was wasting away.

When she agreed to come for Thanksgiving we were all a bit surprised, though it was a good sign. Last year she spent Thanksgiving in a hospital far from home. She didn’t want anyone around and kept everyone at a distance. Not long after that she was told — after pressing her doctor for his best guess as to her prognosis — that she most likely wouldn’t live to see another year.

So when our family’s table for 17 this year included my mom and her husband, when I spent this past weekend listening to my mother read stories to my daughter, when I heard them making each other laugh while I made dinner, when I saw them delight in each other during the few days we shared — these were precious moments I never thought I’d ever see, and for which I am so grateful, that I will cherish.

For more Perfect Moments, click on over to Write Mind Open Heart (formerly Weebles Wobblog).

~ by luna on November 29, 2010.