Precious to me
This is one of those things that makes me believe in a loving God. I just found these yesterday: pictures of my mother from when she was a baby till just before she had me in her early 20s. I can’t even begin to describe what an emotional find this was for me. I am 26 years old and the only pictures I have ever seen of my mother from before she had me were pictures from her wedding. I had never seen what she looked like as a baby, little girl, and teenager, and some of the pictures from after my birth were shots I had never seen before.
Last night I came over to my parents’s home, thinking I would get to see my mother in the evening on Sunday. She wound up not coming home from her day out in Seattle and decided to stay with my aunt and uncle instead. My father did come home last night and sat me down. He told me my mother had stopped eating, had not eaten in several days, and was not looking good. He warned me that it is getting very close to the end and she may not make it to the end of the week. She almost certainly won’t go two weeks, he said.
Of course this was sad news, and I began thinking I ought to see if I could round up pictures of her for a collage at her funeral. I imagined this collage would involve mostly recent pictures since I didn’t think we had any pictures from her younger days. I spent maybe five minutes looking through stacks of pictures, opened a cupboard I had seldom looked through before… and there they were. I stayed up until almost 3 AM last night scanning them and uploading them to Facebook, and I haven’t even done all of the ones I found.
This morning my mother went to a routine weekly doctor’s appointment and was admitted to the hospital with a fever of 101 degrees. By the time I saw her this afternoon (and finally got to give her the comfort book that I made last week), the fever was gone AND SHE WAS EATING AGAIN. She looked good, she was in no pain, and she insisted that she isn’t done fighting yet. She loved the book and she loved the pictures from her childhood; those were truly a treasure to find. Apparently my grandmother (who died two years ago) had been saving the pictures and I stumbled onto her cache. None of us had known about them before.
I can’t say what’s going to happen with my mother. Last night when my father spoke to me, he was sure it’d be a miracle if she made it to the end of the week. He was crying when he called me this morning to tell me she was being admitted to the hospital with a fever. Now it looks very likely that she has a little more time left at least. We hope, and we pray, and we know that every day that we have left together is a blessing. We’re taking nothing for granted.
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