Just Another Day
Mom would have turned 73 this week. Grandma would have turned 106 next month. They died nearly a decade apart. I know that time goes on and life continues, but you always miss your loved ones after they’ve passed on. At least, I would hope, though I know that we all have different relationships and connections with those who we refer to as family.
Now, I highly doubt that Grandma would have made it to 100, much less 106, but even at the ripe old age of 90, I think she lived a full life. Her absence still resonates, even more with how dumb the world has gotten since her departure. I have to think that her perspective would be refreshing, as old-fashioned as it likely would have been.
I don’t know if Mom would have made it to 70. For some reason, I am convinced that COVID-19 would have taken her out. I don’t think that she had a compromised immune system. I just have this mindset that she would have gotten COVID-19 and that it would have killed her, all before she turned 69-years old. Historically, Mom wasn’t prone to illness, but in her later years, I questioned the extent to which she could have fought off disease. In the end, we never had to worry about her acquiring COVID-19 because she died just over a year before COVID-19 ravaged the world and did its damage. Maybe in that regard, Mom dodged a bullet, though a much different figurative bullet would take her out in 2018.
I don’t get emotional around this time of year and since her passing, I never found myself sobbing or wondering why she was taken from us the way she was. I still recognize and acknowledge that her birthday is in late May. Even in life, Mom seldom referenced or made any mention of her birthday. Since her death, I make a slighter bigger deal about it because to me, it’s become a sort of personal holiday for me. I don’t know if my siblings do anything to celebrate Mom like I do, being that we don’t talk about it or have ever talked about it, but I don’t need their validation to do what I do. Mom’s birthday celebration always consists of eating at any one of her favorite restaurants. I don’t necessarily spend that day thinking about her, being that I think about Mom on a daily basis and don’t need a special occasion to do it. Since she was cremated and she now permanently lives in an urn, I don’t give her flowers. Even in life, she wasn’t a huge fan of special occasion floral arrangements. In death, flowers for Mom still aren’t a consideration.
So, as for that video I have included in this post, this was the song that had played on the radio as I drove home that early morning in the near hour after Mom had died. Oddly, I had never heard this song before, not on the radio or through any other means, but when I heard this song that morning amidst that hour’s darkness and paid attention to the lyrics, I couldn’t help but think that this was a message to me from Mom. It was almost as though she was speaking to me from afar and somehow letting me know that she was okay and that she transitioned well. Needless to say, this is the one song I make it a point to listen to on both her birthday, as well as on her death anniversary. Call me sentimental.
Well, as it happens every year, Mom’s birthday will come and go. I’ll celebrate her memory with food as well as with the various memories I have of her through the years, dating from childhood all the way to adulthood. From here, we’ll then set our sights on the next celebration, which will occur in October when I commemorate her death.