Five years ago yesterday
…my mom left us to go hang out in Heaven.
John 14:2-3, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”
The picture was taken when my mom first met our first daughter, Riley, a year before my mom passed away. Toward the end, Riley brought some of the last smiles to my mom’s face at the hospital when my mom watched Riley learning to walk…and ironically, my mom was also struggling to walk.
The metastatic breast cancer that my mom had been fighting had moved to her brain and was limiting her in many ways. The last couple of months we experienced ever-dimming glimpses of my mom’s personality.
I still remember the last thing my mom said to me. A little over two weeks before her passing I spent most of the day on the floor working on a puzzle in my mom’s room. She said nothing. Different people would stop by and we would have conversations. Seemingly, my mom was just an observer. She did smile once when my sister and I laughed about my college ID picture that my mom never thought was funny. I had shaved a receding hairline for it.
But, as I was saying goodbye, something burst through the haze that hung over her efforts to communicate, and she uttered, “Thank you for coming” and smiled at me. The three of us in the room at the time, while internally amazed, for my mom’s sake all acted as if it were perfectly normal that she had just spoken…as if she had been participating in the conversation all along.
Two weeks later, we spent our Thanksgiving at the hospice. That Saturday, the battle was over.
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