i started this blog as a way to document a year, looking at today, ahead, and backwards. today it is backwards day. a year ago we held my mom's funeral. she was 73, and went thru a steady 4 month downhill battle with cancer. it was a bit remarkable in that my sister also died in the middle of my mom's ilness, and at one particualry macabre moment my mom was checking out of the hosptial having just signed up for hospice ( " going home to die " ) even as my sister was entering the ambulance sally-port in the same facility with the ER docs validating the do-not-resusitate order with her and my dad.
i kinda spent 15 years of my nursing career as a specialist in hospice style care, but these losses hit me harder than i thought. 2008 was a largely horrible year for me as a result, and people who know me generally saw i was not myself until sometime in august - maybe halfway thru the O2S race, oddly enuf. there are too many friends to thank for hanging in with me over that time, and you know who you are anyway. otherwise, the ultra cool cycling community in general was always there, and even tho i was only going thru the motions for much of 08, that also counted for a lot.
my sister was a special person - she had down's syndrome. born in 1961, she was one of very very few retarded persons who was sen in public in that era. the deal at that time was you sent such people to the state-run psych hospitals - my parents refused, and they were shunned and treated like shit by the social-work profession at that time for doing so. later of course, times changed and the very same people who called my parents selfish and cruel for keeping my sister at home had the unmitigated balls to show up on our porch and start telling my parents how they were doing wrong by not having my sister in normal schools, and so forth. the hypocricy, and outright evilness of this bizarre turnaround was too unbelievable for me to even elaborate on.
not that nancy ever noticed, or gave a shite. she lived a life of joy, and wonder. she never wanted for anything, and she never held any of the darker aspects of the human condition in her self - she had no provision for them. anybody who ever knew her loved her, and for those who didn't she cared not a whit. i always thought that she lived within a veil of grace on this earth, and if you were gonna feel sorry for anybody over the situation it was the rest of us who needed the pity, not her. maybe angels are all around us, and it we who can't see it thru our own fault.
as for my mom, i will say 3 things about her on this day, and move on:
1. in all my life, i never once heard her say a bad thing about anybody. not me, or my siblings, though we deserved it greatly. never one of our friends. no celebrity, or neighbor. she never gossiped. no public figure, politician, or relative. nobody, at no time. even when the church kicked nancy out of the congregation because of her retardation did my mom did not say a word, or intimate any malice.
2. as a dad, i can say that my kids will always be my kids. but in my mom's case it was actually true that she stayed " mom" her entire life. she had essentially a forever 4 year old at home. when her peers all moved on to retire, or travel, or learn to golf, and so forth my mom let them go and her relationships withered by and large. she did not mind. i believe she was happy about it, in fact.
3. my mom worked for over 25 years as a school secetary. when she finally retired, everybody was in a panic over what to but her as a gift. the fact was that nobody, not even people she knew and worked with for decades had any idea what she liked, or wanted. the only thing she ever wanted was for the people around her to be happy. she was the most selfless person i have ever known, or heard of.
finally - when gretchen and my sister were cleaning out my mom's effects, they found a plastic bag deep down in one of her closets. in it were pictures and momento's from every year of nancy's life. she had 6 kids, and all the rest of our childhood crap was scattered around the house like normal. but, nancy's stuff was contained in a secret place of honor, and none of us, even my dad, had any idea it was there. it was a treasure from the angelic forever child held by the selfless forever mom. on their worst days either one of them were 10 times better a person than i have ever been, and i never knew. they lived on this earth together, and they left together but they were better than it is, or maybe something more - the world did not deserve either one of them, in my opinon. i am not a religios person, but i do believe in a Divinity of some kind, and ya never know when it it is right in front of you. in fact it probably is right now, and the only reason we don't know it is ourselves.
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