Emotionally spent, I took a call from my father the next morning after what would have been Mom's 50^th. I was weary with crying, weary with longing, and weary with doing it all behind closed doors because this is now her second birthday that I've celebrated without her, and I wouldn't want to be accused of being overly dramatic. I am okay with her death most of the time (well, as "okay" as a person can be with choices that weren't theirs to make), but Mother's day and her birthday just hit me...the two days a year that I dedicated always to her.

"Hi, Dad."

"Hello, doing better today?" He had called the day before and knew I was having a tough time. He had told me that, just like last year, he was going to buy a birthday balloon and tie it to the iron planter at her grave.

"I think so," I replied. "Did you ever make it out to Mom's grave yesterday? I don't think you had been there yet when I stopped by." I had left work early to to buy flowers and place them there.

"I was there first thing in the morning! The balloon wasn't there!? I did stop, Laura, I did!" He had started to cry. I felt like crap for saying anything.

"Well...who knows...maybe Charlie stopped by and wanted it..." I tried to give a soothing explanation.

"No, Charlie didn't think he could go. Said it was too hard."

And then I stopped feeling like a loser for my 20 minute cry at her final resting place, which was really more of a whispered mantra of, "I miss you—oh, God, do I miss you..." because with my father crying in my ear and my brother momentarily dropping off of the face of the planet, it was obvious that I wasn't the only one that finds August the 14^th incredibly painful.

Dad later went back to the cemetery and found the balloon ribbon still tied, but the balloon gone. He called again to say, "Maybe your Mom just liked the balloon and snatched it up." I do rather like that idea.

You would have been fifty years old today. I would have loved to share this day with you. I become so angry when I hear women at work gripe about their age...don't they realize what an accomplishment it is to make it as far as they have? No, they don't. They didn't know you. They didn't lose you.

Gosh, Charlie and I look so young in that picture from your 48^th. I think he and I did years of aging during that last week of your life. We were so torn between wanting to hold you to us forever, yet knowing we had to tell you to let go. You'd be so proud of him, Mom. He's everything you always knew he was capable of becoming and nothing that everyone else thought he was. From his patient eyes to his gentle hands, he is you. I love him to pieces. I wish you could see. Perhaps you do.

I am sad that you're not here.

The Queen Anne's Lace is embroidering the edges of modernity, and I can't help but remember the daintiness you spread around me and the imagination you inspired. You named me after Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott's Beth, two of your favorite heroins of all time because they were quiet in their strength and deafening in their love—I always hoped that I would live up to such a tall name. I always hoped that I would make you proud.

I still do. You were a woman worthy of being impressed.

I love you.

It didn't seem to impress anybody else that I mentioned it to today, but a year ago I had surgery. It was the first surgery of my life, and I remember mostly wanting Mom, whose absence I still hadn't grown accustomed to. I don't even remember the pain all that keenly, only an outside awareness that it existed—this was mostly how I dealt with the pain as well, seeing as how "pain management" seems to be an oxymoron in my body's dictionary.

My family, so recently ravaged by my mother's death, were gathering in her hospital, the one with the Comprehensive Cancer Center, to cross fingers and pray that this was not happening all over again. I was so lucky, so lucky. Everything was raw—my emotions, my body, my spirit—but I was alive and I was going to be okay. My mother's surgeon fixed me in a way that she would have liked to have fixed Mom.

My mother's oncologist never had to meet with me.

They were gathered in an exam room across from mine in the general surgery clinic before I was admitted—I was there for a consultation with no idea I would find myself stuck in the hospital for a week. There must have been 10 them standing in that room across from mine, long white coats and low, detached voices...holding up films and seeming very mechanical. I saw him in that room, her oncologist, and it didn't occur to me until days later that it had been MY films they were all reviewing.

I know it's gone now, all of that...and I'm whole again. I know that it isn't a great practice to look back at bad times because it almost puts you right back in the place where it started and you're miserable all over again. But that is not the reason this event is earmarked in my history.

After Mom died, and even that last month when she was fading so quickly, I felt very alone. Falling asleep at night—what little I was sleeping in those days—would only be a chaser to hours of silent sobbing and feeling so utterly hollow. Who but your mother comes looking for you in the middle of the night when you don't answer their call? Who hurts when you hurt if not her?

I was so taken with what I had lost that I had forgotten what I had. Thank you to those of you who stood by my side even when I wasn't great company (or when I tried to break up with you, depending who you are) and for reminding me that I am loved.

I love you, too.

I had a pelvic ultrasound yesterday which was ordered primarily for the purpose of a "parts count". Waking up from surgery just shy of a year ago, my surgeon notified me that I had a didelphys uterus, another piece of the genetic disorder that I inherited from Mom. My doctor yesterday told me that it is an autosomal dominant disorder but was not as quick to say that children weren't a possibility—only that the fetus would likely be in breech position, it would have to be by cesarean section, and it is likely that it would be a pre-term birth.

Good or bad, I've gotten the hang of accepting what life gives me. I guess I don't have a strong opinion on the matter either way.

I went to these set of doctors after my last physical in May, when my physician still, even looking for it, could not detect an anomaly in my reproductive bits. I was sent to an OB/GYN, and similarly, it took her awhile to find it. I felt so foolish for awhile, because it was like I was pleading my case that I was abnormal. At one point, I told the latest doctor, "Look, I was told about this after I had surgery. I am pretty sure my surgeon physically SAW something out of place. I just want some information about it."

The ultrasound technician was very kind, and said at once that she agreed with my surgeon. Also, that I had two of everything that I was supposed to have two of—which had been a concern with the kidneys—and two of some things that I was only supposed to have one of. I had her draw pictures for Nick because he's very interested in all of this...but I lost them. He is understandably upset.

The next step is sending me to another geneticist. In a complex that often represents itself as incomplete, apparently I demonstrate nearly all of the syndrome's features: sacral agenesis, anorectal malformation, presacral mass, urogenital malformations, and in the slew of "other malformations", I have flat feet and that pesky leak in my spinal cord fluid.

From there, with supposedly more information at my door, I can make an informed decision about permanent birth control. I am concerned that while (fingers crossed), my disorder is not deadly like Mom's wound up being, I do have more of the malformations...and, if it was her mother that gave it to her, which we suspect, Mom certainly had a broader mutation off of hers. Would my child take a step further—if I can even carry to a late enough term—have spina bifida? Have a tumor that develops into Cancer just like Mom's? Is that a pair of dice I want to roll with?

Man, my father must be disappointed: my brother does not want to have children because he doesn't want a child to be like him and here I am pondering the same. And like that, a family name ends.

While going through things at Dad's on Saturday, I found photo albums with an abbreviated assortment of photos capturing yours truly...years ago. Not many pictures of me...years ago actually exist. I learned camera dodging early-on, and even took up my mother's habit of going through pictures as soon as we got the developed prints back and tossing the ones of myself that I didn't like—all of them. Nick has never really been shown the former me.

I'm sure he's wondered at the many times I'll see someone in passing and murmur, "I know them," never actually greeting them. They wouldn't recognize me, and the situation would feel very awkward, me having to explain who I am. The first time I flew home, half-way through my weight loss progress, my own aunt didn't even recognize me in the airport. It's a little lonely at times.

Years ago, a friend who struggled with their weight told us of a visitation she attended for a dear relative. She felt rejected and ignored looking at the poster boards of photos because there were so few of her and the aunt that she always felt closer to than her own mother. A while later, a family member came up to her all teary-eyed and apologizing profusely. "I'm sorry. I could barely find any pictures of you!" She had avoided cameras all her life.

Well, after a lot of deliberation, I decided to show Nick the pictures. He seemed to recognize my cousin Michelle quickly enough, my friends Sarah and Anna—all people he has met in person—but looking at my image, which I found myself having to point out to him, he could only say that I looked really different.

I told him just last night that it's difficult to be proud of what you accomplished when you're so ashamed of where you started. I'm almost shy to bring up my lifestyle change—even though I'd wager that I am healthier than those who have been thin naturally their entire lives—because you worry that the stamp of who you were will obliterate who you became. Ghosts.

Jared, the Subway© guy, said in interview once that when people saw him eating out, they would stare at him, waiting for him to overeat, overly eager to warn him not to finish his plate. It angered me when I read it. Ignorance...pft. Those who have been inducted to the "100 pounds club" know what it takes.

But I've done it now, shown Nick the barely recognizable face that he looks into every day. I guess I wanted to make sure he knew me first. I had nothing to worry about.

We are having a day at Dad's place today. I find it incredibly odd that "Dad's place" used to be the place that I called home, but now it's just "Dad's place". "Home" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. We are going through the house and going through her things, the remnants of my things from North Carolina.

I am hoping that the day won't be too difficult. Dad is renting a dumpster, and me and Charlie, Brenda, and even Nick later on, are going to go about the business of evicting ghosts. It's eerie going in there, her night stand still full of her things, her makeup case and lotions still lined up in neat little rows beneath...her purse sitting in plain sight, as though it is ready to be picked up again at any moment by its owner.

I bought a can of Friskies for Friskey to enjoy while we're there. My poor baby is old, and I don't think she'll be with us much longer. I can tell she's arthritic and miserable. She's lost weight and Dad tells me she's been having problems hitting the litter box. What's worse, one day this week, he woke to find her trying to move around, but it seemed that her back legs weren't working at all. Eventually they kicked in again, but it just doesn't seem right.

To be fair, I didn't expect her to last very long after Mom died...

But it's sad...my friend who grew up with me and old without me. "I am hoping that the day won't be too difficult." Yeah right.

It's nearly impossible to do unless you're one of the lucky chosen few to have an uneventful life. I read an email this morning that took me back to October 2005, right there like I never left—that cruelly sunny afternoon I spent with my dying mother and a "Dear John" note. A friend is going through something similar to what I was going through at the time, and they asked advice on how to go on, how to make breathing feel like less of a gasping effort.

What I wouldn't have given to have had the answer.

Nothing hit me as hard as my life crumbling to pieces at my feet. I was broken. I remember the feeling of being undesirable and unwanted all too well, and I spent too many nights praying that I wouldn't wake the next day. There was something very close to the stitching of my self worth about that particular cut, and I was a shell of a friend, of a daughter, of a person.

But, as Aunt Brenda predicted, Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Once the haze of hurt thinned, all I could think was, "Hadn't I earned more respect than that?" I had. And, finally, I found the desire to look forward, closing the curtain on my vigil of the past.

My friend said they read from the archives of this site and surmised, "I see it was for the best for you, it really was." Take time to grieve. You are mourning the loss of something that was living not so very long ago. Open your eyes to the wealth of love and care around you, open them more quickly than I did...you are ending a chapter, not your story. You go on to be a great conqueror of that which will try to hold you back, and you will redefine happily ever after to a splendor you didn't know to dream. It will be best for you too. You will make it so.

Dad asked me to go this year—I hadn't been planning to do so as last year's reduced me to a sniveling mess. It was a cold rainy night and Brenda and I hightailed it out of there partway through the opening ceremony. There was a woman speaking about how we have to be proactive in our own health, how she felt sick and the doctors couldn't find what was wrong...but she still felt sick so she kept going back and kept going back...and Brenda and I had enough of that going on in our immediate lives just then—the feeling not right and nobody being able to figure out why. We were not of the mentality to hear a similar story that ended with "You have Cancer."

But my excuses ran dry when the sunny 90° day dawned, a good 40°-50° warmer than last year, and I had received an answer to my health woes that didn't involve the "c" word anywhere by the end.

I got all the way through the opening ceremony this time, and nearly lost it when it was announced that my mother's old company had dedicated a lane in her name again this year. It warms me that she was so well loved, and that her memory is kept alive by those that she cherished so deeply: her friends. I remember the 2005 Relay for Life...I spent it with her at the house. Dad went off to the event, leaving us to hide. There is and honor in fighting a disease and publicly proclaiming that you WILL overcome, and I don't mean to insinuate otherwise...but for Mom, she was handed a death sentence from the get-go.

"You will never be Cancer free."
"Good news is, at the rate of growth, you have about fifteen years."
"At this rate of growth, you have about two years."
"This is growing much more rapidly than we had expected. You have about three months."

She found it difficult to face her killer when she really was in no mood to die.

So, this was really the first opening ceremony that I have ever attended, and I didn't know about the survivor lap. I didn't know how tight my chest would feel as I imagined her down there in a purple shirt. I didn't know that tears would blur my vision and show her image to me down there on the track, only to lose her all over again when I blinked. I didn't know how much it still hurt. They released their balloons into the air and I tilted my face toward the sky to watch, looking through firmaments that I don't know to actually exist to see her face...and, there, I know where I can find her.



It was a beautiful night.

For the longest time, I would be standing at the present, and looking back at the way things were the previous year. I suppose it began when the really tough times began to hit, and I longed for that other time back, the time before I truly understood mortality and pain. Gradually, it transitioned that my thinking that life is so good and looking back to remind myself that things were really hard there for awhile. It was my affirmation that I am strong, that I can overcome, and that I will always survive.

But this is the last weird anniversary for me, the next several days—the last time I had to force myself to do something that scared the bejeezus out of me. A year ago today was my last day at one job, which I left for lack of benefits (A very timely move considering that medical emergency thing that popped up 6 weeks later). That night was Relay for Life and ABS Global, where my mother was employed, had a lane dedicated to her. I spent the next day packing up Miles' things, purging albums of the photographic memories we had had together. The day after that, I saw him to go over the divorce papers—the first time I had seen him since I returned home that October day to find him gone. The day after that, I stood before a judge and declared that my marriage was irreconcilably broken. And, the day after that, I began working at my current job.

Easily one of the most tumultuous five-day stretches in my life, it was a series of endings colliding with a series of beginnings...and it left me absolutely exhausted. I needed Mommy, and she didn't come when I called. I ended one life and stumbled upon the start line of the next. But I'll tell you, I started that next life and haven't looked back. It was something I needed to do but truly dreaded doing so...and, being that I forged through and all, perhaps Mom came running after all.

Sometimes I catch myself smiling for no reason and I take stock. It almost doesn't feel natural to be this far out from some sort of trial and at times I wonder when the other shoe will drop. It was one thing after another after another for so long that I truly believed what Aunt Brenda said at the center of our family crises: "We had too many good years." Well if that be the case, and we travel through phases of good, then bad instead of a constant balance, I'm standing at the entrance to some really great times.

There are few times in the year I enjoy as much as Mother's Day, because it celebrated everything that you had given to me, taught to me, and hoped for me—a tribute to your selflessness and love. I used to go around reading all of the tear-jerking plaques and touching the delicate petals of the lovely bouquets gathered in the name of the most special person on Earth: a mother.

My mother.

You had such a soft, dainty touch with me, yet you were a hard worker and would come in after a Saturday gardening, cleaning, and pruning with blistered hands. Perhaps your gentleness meant so much more knowing your strength. I loved just hanging around you...we used to get up early on Saturday mornings and go "bumming around"...maybe it was just a trip to a retail store or to pick up a few groceries, but we'd drive around extra blocks singing to the music on the radio, laughing at each other's silliness...find a parking lot with a pretty view of the morning sun and just talk. You were easily my best friend, and though you'd wish it differently, the now empty position will not be filled.

I get how this is supposed to go now, this being here without you...and even though I'd wish it differently, I understand about going on and continuing the life you wanted me to live. I see beauty in the ordinary again—the beauty that you taught me to see. I remember so many Summer nights, "Laura! Laura! Come quick!" I'd follow her voice to the western-facing bedroom windows and we'd stand there washed in the iridescent burn of a setting sun. "God paints us a pretty picture," you'd say. It's a statement that crosses my mind often in adulthood, and I am able to enjoy what many fail to even notice.

Because of you.

I dealt with a lot of the people you knew from the UW Hospital in the last months, and they all remembered you. With all of the patients they see, and with all the time that had passed since they had seen you, they remembered. Linda, my [our] surgeon's nurse, took care of all of my pre-op appointments and battling with my HMO to get things covered. She said a few times, "Thank God your mother didn't live to see this happen to you. This would have killed her if the Cancer hadn't." And I had to cry, because it would have. You would have blamed yourself for passing on your genetic anomalies. A phone call with the geneticist and he mentions wryly and more to himself, "I guess it's just luck that your mother's body didn't reject you." I guess that's what happens when you really want something...you really wanted me and I really wanted you, and we both fought to get me here. I wouldn't have it any other way. It is a testament to the human spirit that every now and then, we can defy science and, too, make one and one equal something other than two.

It is raining right now. I can smell it through the window on the crisp air, the subdued tapping playing against the roof. It is supposed to clear up as the day goes on, but we'll share this bit of rain, you and I. A dark chill isn't meant to last, but to be respected while it is here.

I love you.