My Mom at 89 and Such

A recent PET scan showed lumps on my mom's lungs and thyroid. 

We are still waiting biopsies and more information. But when I called her (to comfort her, ha, and then immediately burst into tears that needed comforting themselves), she shushed me calmly with an, "Well I am turning 89 this summer after all. With or without these lumps, I might drop dead tomorrow." 

Haha. My dear mother. 

I need to hedge that "89" business about with this though: It's the same thing I feel compelled to clarify when I tell people I have 10 kids. 

"I have 10 kids. But it isn't like TEN kids." 

It's true, you know. You hear "10 kids" and suddenly your mind is full of images of children swinging wildly about on ceiling fans, and children sliding down banisters, while other children sit--tied up and with gags in their mouths--at the mercy of some other siblings carrying tomahawks and making war cries; bags of flour and jugs of milk are spilled on every surface, windows are broken, and the cacophony of voices is deafening. 

Sometimes we might resemble that a little :), but mostly I think people find it surprisingly normal around here. 10 kids. But not like ... 10 kids.

I would describe my mom at 89 in the same way. "Sure she's 89. But she's not like ... 89!" 

Whatever you imagine up when you hear 89, it isn't my mother. 

She drives, and cleans, and gives sound advice, and knows how to work a computer better than I do. She trims branches and hauls them off, and makes Thanksgiving dinners. She teaches primary and plays the piano when needed for various church functions. She even shovels her driveway if one of the grandkids perpetually living in her basement don't get to it first. Why, just the other day I took her a skirt I needed taken in, and she deftly fixed it up. 

While she claims she could drop dead tomorrow, she could just as likely, with her genes, live another decade. And, while, as I said, we don't know anything about what these lumps mean yet, being confronted with even the idea of her leaving has been incredibly rattling for me.

I've been trying to make sense of what I've been feeling. My dad going nine years ago was a hard loss. But somehow, as long as my mom was still here, it felt like all my childhood--all of those memories and experiences, despite time moving me on from them, were still safely there and intact: in her, in that home she keeps safe for us. 

It feels almost as if her parting would blow forever out of my grasp all the last bits of all that joyful living that I cling to: waking on Thanksgiving morning to the smell of turkey, cuddled up on my top bunk listening to The Hobbit, waiting in the hall in freshly made nightgowns to go into the living room with the massive and colorfully lit tree on Christmas morning, General Conference playing on a radio in the kitchen--the voices always a moment behind the ones coming from the TV in the living room--while my mom peeled and cut potatoes for our in-between-sessions meal, sleeping out on the deck, coloring Easter eggs and carving pumpkins at the kitchen table, sledding down the "no-dump" hill, my mom at the kitchen closet sewing (always with pins in her mouth) or looking through her microfilm reader for family names, etc.

Anyway, it's all made me very sentimental about life.

My mom used to jokingly say that maybe Polk's End (my childhood home) could be ours in the Celestial Kingdom someday. Only now I am thinking it more seriously. Please, somehow, let that place, and every part of the living in it, be eternally ours. At the very least I need to be able to walk into my dad's office, lie on his couch, and listen to KBYU FM and his fingers typing away on his typewriter. I feel actually physical pain thinking of those things passing out of my reach forever. Somehow, they mustn't!

(Above: The stairway going up to the attic and my dad's office. My dad's office as it looks today.)