It is Tuesday. The second Tuesday of this July 2025. July 8. It is the third anniversary of my sweet mother’s passing. It is just as hot and humid and sunny today as it was three years ago.
This morning, I listened to the few voicemails from her that I was able to save. Some of them are voicemails to my daughters. A message about a particular green yarn that she found for a sweater made popular by Harry Styles at the time, that my youngest wanted, a message apologizing if she interrupted the school day with her call. Some are messages to me. A message in which she couldn’t reach me by phone and said she’d text me instead (she sounded frustrated in that one). And a message about the steroid and insulin prescription she was going to pick up, that the doctor said would help the swelling in her brain. In none of the ones to me does she say she loves me, which is unusual.
I looked through pictures of her, too. From 2013, when she was healthy and happy. From later, in 2021, where she was showing the effects of the cancer on her body. In all of them, she is smiling. Always smiling. Always just seizing the damned day.
The pictures are hard for me. I wish I could look at them, and listen to the voicemails, and not feel bitterness mixed in with the sad. Bitterness at the doctors. At the cancer. At all of the awful memories.
There is the picture of her on the plane, with my husband, on a weekend trip to Baltimore to see family, a year and a half before she passed. She is smiling, her shoulders touching his, proud of herself for taking part in this adventure. I recall that we’d bought her a nice carry-on suitcase, hopeful, she’d get lots of opportunities to use it.
There is the picture of her at my oldest daughter’s graduation in June, a year before she passed, where she smiled brightly, though in reality I remember her being really quite weak and a bit dotty from the cancer medication they were throwing at her at the time.
There is the picture of her in the wheelchair outside of that awful one-star rehab facility in Sanford that Medicare chose for her when she left the hospital for I don’t even know what, later that summer. Because hospital physicians always recommend a rehab facility after a hospital stay for older people, often for no particular reason other than it must be what they’ve been taught. I wonder – do they know how awful and generally useless most of the rehab facilities are, and how all the work they did at the hospital to heal a patient is most certainly completely undone in a matter of days at these places?
There is the picture of her at the kitchen table in March, less than four months before she passed. Smiling, in front of a cake celebrating her 78th birthday. She always liked her sweets. I knew then she didn’t have much time – maybe she knew it, too – but I was grateful she’d made it to 78. It wasn’t 100, though, which is what she really wanted.
And there is the picture that exists only in my mind of her the morning she passed. I won’t discuss that, except to say that I still remember the warmth of her hand squeezing mine as her time waned. And I hope I did enough and that she knew how much I cared.
This day is a hard day. When I allow myself to sit and think about it. I miss her. I know how proud she’d be of our daughters. And how much joy she would have gotten from seeing them succeed. I’m sad for all the things I didn’t do for her. Really, I just miss her.
surviving nc 