My Mother's Last Days

I know my mom is nearing the end of her life. I've decided to write down some memories from my life about her, something she taught me or something happening now and how difficult this is. I don't know how many times I will get to write before she's gone. And time is scarce right now as I am with her more and also trying to take care of other things in my life.

My mom has been one of the most influential people in my life, if not the most. I look at her characteristics and think how blessed I am that I inherited many of them. She loves people. She brought people into her home for meals or parties and created the fun that made happy memories with and for them. She was all about details - the food, decorations, place settings, etc. I learned how to throw a party because of my mom.

She was a great cook and made delicious meals. I'm not the cook she was but I learned many things from her. As a young girl I learned how to bake desserts and cookies, mash potatoes, make a fruit salad - simple things. As a teen I helped her bottle tomatoes (squishing them was the best part) and apricots (there's another story about apricots I'll have to share) and I helped her make sweet pickles - a complicated, lengthy process. She gave me her pickle crock a few years back because she remembered that we made pickles together and she wanted me to have it. As a young married woman I called her and asked how to bottle pears. She told me and wrote the instructions down for me. I still have that paper. I bottle pears every fall. We both love them, especially with cottage cheese. We made strawberry and raspberry freezer jam together nearly every summer when I returned to Utah in 1999. She taught me how to make "her" stuffing, to stuff and roast a turkey. My family doesn't like stuffing any other way.

My mom taught me to sew. When I was young she made matching dresses and headbands for us - mine was blue velvet; hers was black. I wish I still had those dresses. I can see them in my mind's eye. She showed me how to mend things, to sew on a button and fix a hem. I've done many of those things for her in the past 16 years or so.

My mother loved flowers and took great care in her yard. One summer she had a broken leg. (My dad had accidentally hit her with a golf ball while golfing. He never golfed again.) She used a mechanic's creeper to move along her flower beds. I helped her dislodge the petunias, geraniums and other flowers from their plastic containers and drop them in the holes she had dug. I took over planting her flowers many years ago, creating colorful pots of flowers, hanging her large baskets on the front porch, caring for the geraniums in her blue planter box dad had made. I don't plant many annuals in our yard but when I do, I think of my mom.

Mom used to keep a very tidy house. "A place for everything and everything in its place." I learned how to clean, do laundry, wash windows, dust, vacuum and more. I keep a pretty tidy house too because of what she taught me. The past 15 years or so I cleaned at her house even though for many of those years she was capable. I wanted to ease her load, pay her back, show my love. I'm not a big gift giver. If I give gifts they are more utilitarian than fluffy but I'd rather give the gift of time and effort, making memories, making life easier for someone.

All these things are valuable to me - learning how to cook, sew, keep house. Yet the thing I loved learning most from my mom was how to treat, love and care for others. It's not just that she taught me how to love, she taught me how to not hate. My mom has never hated anything. (Many years ago she said she didn't like the pink flamingos people stick in their yards, that they were tacky. That just started a barrage of pink flamingo paraphernalia to her from family and friends. Maybe if she'd said she didn't like twenty dollar bills ...). Some of my mother's sayings were, "be a good actress," "kill them with kindness," "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." I learned tact and grace from my mom. I learned to love people of every walk of life and to not judge others. I learned you can disagree without being disagreeable and that you could listen and respect others' points of view. Someone could treat my mom unkindly and she would return it with a smile and a kind word. She smiled a lot, accepted a lot, soothed a lot. My mom was the ultimate picture of genuine kindness.

I'm grateful I can be at peace in my heart, that when others say or do something that would be offensive and hurtful I can, hopefully, remember my mom and how she dealt with things. I'm not perfect at it. I hurt and sometimes cry when someone is mean to me. I'm sure she hurt when that happened to her too. But it's a Christlike quality to turn the other cheek, to forgive quickly and easily. My heart is happier when I can be that way, no matter the circumstances. And I'm grateful to her for emulating that quality so I could learn from one of God's choicest spirits. Thank you mom.