Caution: Life Memory Approaching

I am not an outstandingly private person. I pretty much have been an open book since about 2009.

But I used to wear a mask to hide emotion because emotional people can be taken advantage of, or so I believed, and rightly so.

My mother was more of a beating pulse to me than a friend, or really even a mom. I was her child, and now I realize that she was me, now. I did what she said, I laughed at all her antics cause she was downright funny and did not learn enough from her while she was alive. I never knew her story. That's one of my biggest regrets.

When she was laying in a hospital bed at Munroe Memorial in Ocala, Florida, dying of pancreatic cancer, in 1979...I had given birth to my own child that January, and I was visiting her from my home in Atlanta. We chatted and talked nonsense, really, nothing in particular. Nothing that mattered. Nothing that mattered.

What I wished I had done was connect with her as a woman. As a person. But instead, I continued to play the child card. I suppose, as I led a fairly sheltered life, growing up in the 60s but still so naive, I didn't know how to be grown up, and here I was, with a brand-new baby and a husband who was not dealing with the responsibility well.  But, to my mom and dad, I was newly married, had a great career and a handsome and devoted husband with a great job, and I had a beautiful baby girl, with the middle name of my mom's favorite brother, who was long dead from a B-52 airplane crash while he was in the military. Everything looked good on the outside. On the inside, I didn't know what to do. Did not know what to feel or say or be.

Her last question to me as I walked out the hospital door was, "Brenda, am I dying?"

My reaction was immediate and so full of bullshit. "No, mom, you are getting better!"

I wished I had been honest. Dad had already told me that she was within a few days of leaving the earth. She was jaundiced and spotty and thin as a strand of spaghetti. The final days, dad would not let anyone in the room because he didn't want us to remember her the way she was. That is my other regret. That I lied to her, that I could not treat her as the person she was, and instead just blurted out some garbage. I had never lied to her, and my last words to her were a lie.

The last two days of her life, she asked for soup and Jell-o. Although she could not process the food, the doctor allowed it, because she was so chipper about it, and said she felt much better and that she was hungry. I have heard the near-dying have a spurt of feeling good right before death. My dad had stopped morphine, on my mom's request and perhaps that helped, because I have also heard that morphine tends to dull everything, including happiness.

I got the phone call from my dad while I was at work in Atlanta. I booked a flight home within an hour, and my little daughter and I attended her funeral. Her coffin was titanium in color, shiny and deep, deep grey. It had enameled calla lilies in the corners, and there were about 30 people there. Perhaps more. I was numb.

My dad was stoic, as always. I don't remember anything else. I don't remember who was there, I don't remember my sisters or even how I got home or how I reacted to anything.

That night, dad showed me the closet in mom's room. It was filled with her presence, and there were packages everywhere. Turns out, they were clothes for my daughter that would fit her until she was five years old. There were photo albums she had meticulously put together for each of her daughters, and mine was there. The last photo was one of her holding my daughter when she came to Atlanta after she was born. The last inscription was, "Oh, and what will she grow up to be!"

Dad said she knew for months before she went in for her diagnosis that she was sick with "something bad." I never knew. He knew, but I didn't and I don't think my sisters did, either.

There's really no point in this missive but to be cathartic to me, and to perhaps inspire you to, if you can, call your mom. Just stop now and call your mom. Make arrangements to see her, and to hear her story. From the beginning. From her.

Because, it really is that important.