Time marches On... Whether We Like It Or Not

One of my best friends at work has a son who is a sophomore in college. His girlfriend is eighteen, they met at the church he was interning for as a youth minster assistant over the summer. This girl's mother was in the end stages of cancer at the age of 54. She died last week... The funeral was today. I can TOTALLY empathize with this young girl and her current situation. Mine varies a little; my mother was completely healthy as far as we knew. My sister and I were out shopping for clothes with my mom, when she suddenly clutched a rack of clothes, looked totally confused, and fell to her immediate death right in front of her daughters. My sister was in her early twenties, I was seventeen. It was a time when I hate to admit it, but I was sometimes embarrassed by my mom. I used to make her let me out of the car a block away from the high school, and just generally thought she was an idiot. Let me point out that she was the greatest woman I have ever met, and I was truly and completely blessed to have her for a mother. But sometimes when you are seventeen... the world just isn't spinning right, things don't make sense; and you are the only person in the world that matters. I can remember my mom telling me that the older I got, the smarter she would seem. Of course I probably just laughed at her behind her back, jumped into a car with my cheer leading buddies, and went off to live my carefree life for a few hours. But as I have grown older, it seems to me almost prophetic... her words.... she was SOOOO right. Everything she tried to tell me, everything she tried to make me do, was EXACTLY and totally what I needed... I just didn't want to listen. I remember a couple of days before she died, I was at West Ga. College at cheer leading camp with my cronies. The news came over the radio that Elvis Presley had just died. I don't know how old my reader's of this blog are... but that was a REALLY big deal. How could the King of Rock N Roll be dead? At the invincible age of seventeen, death just wasn't in my vocabulary. I was shocked and shaken. I went into a phone booth to call my mother.... something I would have NEVER normally have done. I reached her, told her that I had just heard the news about Elvis. I wasn't that big a fan of his, but I knew people that were, and for him to be GONE... was unreal to my seventeen year old mind. It was the first brush with death that I had ever had, and it hit me in the chest like a freight train. I suddenly realized that no one was exempt from the fate of death, and it truly and deeply scared me. I slumped to the floor of the phone booth, and sobbed to my mother. I told her I was so sorry I had been such a bitch to her, so disrespectful to her and unappreciative of her. I cried like a baby, and told her countless times how much I really loved her. And you know what? She acted like it was nothing. She told me not to worry... She said she had ALWAYS known that I loved her, no matter how I acted , she KNEW how much she meant to me, and she felt the same way about me. She said not to worry about anything... "Know that I love you too, and will pick you up from camp tomorrow, and you, your sister and I will go shopping." I felt so relieved to have gotten all my "Brat"itude out in the open and tell this wonderful woman that I had treated so badly over the past year, that I truly DID love her... and you know what? I got absolutely no attitude from her or condemnation, just an "I LOVE YOU TOO " The next day, she picked me up from camp, and for once in a great long while, it felt almost exhilarating to see my MOM drive up. She acted as if the whole crying jag in the phone booth had never happened, and was just her same jovial self. We rode back to the outskirts of Atlanta, nothing mentioned of my emotional break down ( much to my seventeen year old relief) . The next day, my mom, my sister and I went shopping for school clothes... my senior year started in one week. It was a fun trip, I felt at peace, I was on top of the world. I was in the changing room, needing another size jeans that my mom was getting, when my sister called to me to come out. I went out to see a completely glazed look on my mother's face... she reached for a rack of clothes, pulling it over and collapsing on the floor. She opened her eyes once and looked at me.... It is a look that I will never forget, and sometimes hate to remember. The clerk called 911, my sister immediately started CPR. But you know what? Our mom was gone in an instant... I knew it at seventeen, my sister knew it in her early twenties.. we ALL knew it at that exact, precise moment in time; moment in our life, and now in our memory. My dad was called second after the ambulance... but she never opened her eyes again, never spoke again, and like a flash of lightning ... she was GONE. My sister and I followed my dad who rode in the ambulance with my mom , in Friday rush hour traffic in downtown Atlanta. We met at Grady Hospital... When we got there, my dad was sitting in a small room , all by himself; calling friends to go pick my brother up from his grocery store job, and bring him home. But you know what? It was hard pressed to be called home anymore. It was the beginning of twenty years of getting over my mother's death. But had I not had that emotional, bonding, forgiving phone call with her; I sincerely don't know if I could have lived through, and come out of the experience of her death, with any type of emotional well being. She KNEW that I loved her, she knew it and felt it; I was the one in denial. But that is the most wonderful and amazing things about parents... I have since learned this through my own parenting experience. We know how we have raised you, taught you and instilled values in you. You may act like you hate us, treat us like we are the enemy but WE KNOW!! As my wonderful, fabulous mother once told me... "The older YOU get, the smarter WE will seem!" And Thank the Good Lord above... every word of her comment was true, and has made me not only love her for being my mother, but for making me the mother that I am to my own kids today.