Another birthday feast begins. Only me, in my arrogance and self-centeredness, would turn a birthday into a three-day feast. Hah! But I am me and you are not. Happy Birthday to me.
Today is the feast of the Immaculate Conception. My Mother always regarded this day highly and I think I recall some discussion about it either being the day she went into labor or the day she prayed to go into labor. Either way I was a month late and it was about damned time.
Today also marks two months to the day since my Mother died. I had planned to write independently of that event as part of my “Why I hate humanity and God and you in particular” series but given the date, now seems as good a time as ever.
Mom died on a Sunday; October 8, 2006. Given the nature of her long illness and her steady decline everyone was trying to get a feel for when the supreme moment would come. Partly it was to ensure we’d be available for the myriad tasks demanded of the survivors, partly to prepare ourselves for the inevitable. I figured she’d go with the full moon. The full moon has always played merry hell with her – and my -state of mind. It seemed appropriate. My cousin thought she would die on a Sunday, as her father had two years before. Of course, since one only seeks coincidences in these things I only remember the predictions that came true. But the full moon one, that’s the truth.
Mom was a fighter. Quite possibly the most vibrantly alive person I’ve ever known. Whatever goofiness I have, I inherited from her. I had almost forgotten in the year she was sick but looking through photos, preparing for the funeral, there were hundreds of pictures of her in all sorts of poses and locations. Always smiling. Usually posing. Generally being a goofball.
Mom died from complications caused by Ovarian Cancer. She was diagnosed in October, 2005. As legend has it, she got the diagnosis the same day her mother got the word that her cancer was in remission. Sadly, I don’t know the date of her diagnosis but I know she didn’t quite live a full year from the day we heard the first bad news until the day we heard the last bad news.
Ovarian Cancer is a nasty disease. It has no obvious symptoms, no reliable way to test for it and it’s deadly as hell: in the United States in a given year one woman will die every hour. In 2006, 20,000 women will contract the disease and 15,000 will die from it. The five year survival rate is not quite 50%. It’s bad. It is very close to as bad as it gets.
Mom never lost hope. She cheerfully submitted to long hospital stays, stomach pumps, distant travels for treatment, strong chemotherapy, experimental drugs, and all the other incidences of a long and punishing disease. And still she managed to keep her household together, to travel on her normal schedule, to see weddings, graduations and birthdays and always, always maintained her smile.