It’s been only three and a half months since our Alaska cruises, but they’ve had some big impacts. When I last left you, my mom’s health was in a decline, though she still had plenty of good days and we had no idea how long things might stay like that. Since I had tested positive for COVID our last night on the Sapphire Princess, I decided to wait a couple of weeks to fly back to Ohio, ultimately using flights I’d booked months earlier, to spend four days with Mom over what would have been her 72nd wedding anniversary.
While she texted me two days before my arrival to tell me she couldn’t wait to see me, Mom declined very rapidly, almost overnight, and entered hospice care my first full day there. We’d taken so many wonderful trips together over the years; I think she was just waiting for me to be with her on one final journey. She spent nine days on hospice care before she passed away. I’ll just copy the post I made on Facebook when that happened. It was raw and heartfelt and though I was exhausted and grief stricken when I wrote it, I really don’t think I can say it any better now.
“My mom passed tonight about 10:45pm. We had a week longer with her than hospice originally thought, and I was able to be with her the entire time (except for one night when I finally had to leave to get some sleep).
While initially unresponsive since last Tuesday, she awoke Sunday while I was washing her face and said “I love you” three times in a row. We had her with us that day and the next before her pain finally required medication Tuesday morning. Those hours she was aware are a gift I will always treasure. Being with her when she passed was a blessing beyond words.
My mom, quite simply, was love.”
Sigh. The ache has lessened but I still find myself, once or twice a week, thinking, “I have to tell Mom about that when I talk to her this evening” (I used to have to carefully time my calls…after the local weather and before Wheel of Fortune came on). I wouldn’t take anything in the world for the last call she made to me, while we were in Glacier Bay on the Sapphire Princess. She just wanted to tell me she loved me (made possible by Starlink Internet). It’s a wonderful world.
Of course, time keeps on spinning. My four day trip stretched to weeks, and while I was sooo happy to return home in September, we immediately started looking at cruises for the fall. Our cruises to Alaska had been pure relaxation, just what we needed after our tornado clean up, and more of the same sounded pretty good right about then. I initially tried to re-book the Sapphire Princess cruises to the South Pacific, South America and Antarctica that I had cancelled when things were still so up in the air with Mom, but the cabin locations we like were gone, and cabin location is very important to us. And, G more so than I, really was not keen to undertake long flights right now. The simple cruises out of Galveston that he did on repeat last winter sounded pretty appealing to him.
Well, all I can say is thank God for Princess Platinum Vacation protection with its 100% back Cancel For Any Reason coverage and for Southwest’s fully refundable flights. I’ve saved points miserly for years, and they have really came in handy this year. At one point in October, I had all of the following flights booked.
I had watched McGee run in a cross country meet in early October. His second place finish (out of more than 100 runners) positioned him well to compete (as a sophomore!) in the conference championship in late October, but we (and he) didn’t know for sure he’d made the team until the week before.
A friend’s daughter was getting married in early November and I didn’t want to miss that. Then McGee made the NCAA Regional and National Cross Country Championship teams. Next year we’ll know to plan for these meets but this year was more tentative (and we’re so proud of him!).
Then my best friend’s mom passed away and we had gotten very close while she was on hospice care, and her funeral was this week, and finally (I hope!) a dear friend who lives alone fell and broke her hip and just arrived home from rehab on Thanksgiving Day and is really going to need some extra help with driving and meals for awhile.
No, cruising is not going to work for me this fall, but I’m fine with that. I’ve said before that my heart is not quite in it like it was, but also I just feel far more connected to people and events at home than I was able to be when we traveled for months at a time. And I’m enjoying this level of involvement immensely. Still I can see us booking something last minute during the winter, and I’ll have Future Cruise Credits to use up within a year. Check back in a few months.
And finally, today was The Game, the Michigan v. Ohio State game, and I’ve had a bad tummy just thinking about it for a week. In the end, the right team won what turned out to be a great game so all’s well in my world. But I want to share one final Mom memory with you, because I’ve sure thought about it all day today.
Toledo, Ohio, where I grew up, is the epicenter of the intense Michigan-Ohio State rivalry, but my family was solidly on the Ohio State side. Then I went to the University of Michigan for graduate school, and, honestly, the earth would have shifted less on its axis if I had married a Rastafarian. It’s always made this weekend in November an interesting one, and I was glad when The Game was played the weekend after Thanksgiving instead of the weekend before, as it was for years. The holiday dinner became a lot less testy when the outcome was still unknown.
On this day last year, my Apple Watch buzzed that I had received a text message from Mom while I was still in bed. That wasn’t unusual; she always texted me when she got up and she always woke up very early. I opened one eye and saw that she had sent me a GIF of a Michigan football player. I thought she was being sweet like she always was, like a “Good luck, let’s hope it’s a great game” kind of thing. Once I got up and looked at the text on my iPhone, I could see that the Michigan football player was a receiver, and that receiver was dropping a pass. And we were off.
For the next several hours, the GIFs flew fast and furiously between us, until we had certainly exhausted all of them that were available. Not a word was exchanged, and we never talked about it afterward, but it was, quite frankly, one of my favorite memories of my mom. That she was in her 90s, understood football as well as any ref, and could still throw such shade…I missed that today, but that memory will make me smile forever.
Life will always be good, because she was my mom. :-)
World’s best mom and a huge Ohio State Fan
Better luck next year, Mom 💙💛