This was a day I was dreading. This was supposed to be the threshold of my mother's departure from this world..."three months to live" comes due today.

My heart is full of my mother, this heavenly creature who gave me life. I think of the day that we moved back to Wisconsin. Traffic was at a standstill because of an accident, and Mom called every 15 minutes because of her excitement to see us. She warned more than once, "Now remember...I'm ugly now...bald and pale." I scoffed at her over the phone, I scoff at her now: I've never known a more beautiful woman.

I think of my visit home last December. She greeted me at the airport, having been waiting there 3 hours just to make sure she wouldn't miss me. I came home to find that she had made lavender-filled sachets for each of the dresser drawers I was to use during my stay...she made these while she was undergoing a form of chemotherapy that stripped the skin from her fingertips and made them ache painfully.

I think of her last March, when we said goodbye...and she pulled all of the strength in her reserves not to cry as I left...but crashed into depression for all the month afterwards. I remember receiving her phone call weeks later saying the treatment, the one that we were so hopeful about, had not worked. Normally in check with my emotions, I couldn't have stopped the sobs to save my life.

Now we are at the end of the sentence, and we have been granted a momentary reprieve. This is the best birthday of my life, because I still have my mother, and I now appreciate her presence when I have taken it for granted so many years previous. She gave me life, she gives me love, and now she gives me purpose. Life is precious, and hope is the only tune that doesn't ring false.

In 1995, after the Oklahoma City Bombing, Garth Brooks sang a song called, "The Change." There are a couple pieces of imagery that have remained lodged in my heart, though it's been years since I've heard the song.



Hope isn't easy. It seems futile and stupid a lot of the time. I accept the things I cannot change, but I still hope in the back corners of my mind that there is a ray of light yet to shine. This is a precious day.