On the morning after the long night of my Mother’s death, my brother-in-law, who couldn’t be with us, sent us this photo. My siblings and I gathered around the computer and stared at my Mom’s youthful face in silence for a long time. Greg gave us a priceless gift we didn’t even know we needed. A visual reminder that my Mother was a whole human being. She lived an entire lifetime. Some of it was shared with us, but ultimately her life was her own.
It took months of grieving before memories of Mom were cancer-free. Slowly stories of her as an energetic, complex, irreverent woman began to overtake the more recent ones of chemo, hospice, saying goodbye.
Our Mothers As We Never Saw Them, brought all of this back to me. I searched my online albums for that photo of my Mom but couldn’t find it. Did my bother have it? He did. He sent it to me and once again I was staring at a computer screen, silently, in tears.
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