Dear journal,

Monday, August 23, 2010… my mother died. What can you say at a time like this when the person that meant everything to you is no longer there? My mom was my best friend. She stuck with me through every phase of my life. When no one else supported me, she was always there. There were times when we had our disagreements and she would say, “You’ll miss me when I’m gone!” She was so right.

I suppose I should have seen it coming; she had been sick for the last year and a half, and this past summer had been extremely hard. She had been in  the hospital four times in three months, and seemed to go downhill everyday. In my last entry I wrote that the doctors wanted to insert a feeding tube in her stomach to give her nourishment, which I allowed. Afterwards she was sent to a nursing home to recuperate. The nursing home I chose specialized in rehab and was said to have a high success rate of getting patients like my mom off the feeding tube and able to eat on their own. With a healthy diet and lots of therapy, it was said, patients like my mom were able to return home in a few months.  I was so optimistic that my mom would get better. I visited her every day and did everything I could to encourage her and make sure she was well cared for. My family was very supportive too. My two closest aunts — my mom’s sister “Marcie” and her aunt “Ella” — came up from Arkansas to see how she was doing and were my house guests during that time. Everything seemed to be in order which is why I was totally unprepared for what was to come the day I got that phone call at work.

School in my town had started two weeks earlier, so I was back on the job as a teacher’s aide. I was assisting students in the computer lab when my cell phone rang. At first I ignored it because I was in the middle of work and I couldn’t just walk off the job to answer my cell. I figured I would return the call later. But when the phone rang a second and third time, I politely excused myself and went out into the hallway. The reception where I work is terrible, but through the static I could make out my aunt Ella saying that the nursing home had just called and said that mom was unresponsive and had been rushed to the hospital, and that I should come home right away.

I was worried, of course, but these emergency trips to the hospital had become routine because there had been so many of them. I figured I would go home, pick up my aunts, and we would all go to the ER only to be told that mom was going to be in the hospital again for a few days and all would be fine. I was wrong.