My mother

My mother was a New Year's baby, born January 1, 1934. On New Year's Day of 2010, my mother turned 76. On that day, as we did every year, my wife, children, and I made the trip from Cincinnati to Frankfort to my parents' home to celebrate my mother's birthday. And like every year, the trip was a major pain in the rear. After all, we had just made the trip down to Frankfort the week before for Christmas. I don't know if you have ever made the 95 mile trip back and forth between those two cities, but if you haven't, let me tell you that the word "exciting" doesn't fit anywhere into a description of the trip. It doesn't matter which route you take (and there are about three routes that make any sense), there's nothing exciting about any of them, and making the trip twice in a week just pushes the whole experience over the line from being unexciting to qualifying as out and out tedious. But it's not my mom's fault that she was born a week after Christmas, so we go every year.

And after an hour and a half road trip down to Frankfort, and an hour and a half at a local restaurant (One of the quirks of my family is that we don't spend a lot of time at gatherings actually talking or anything--we pretty much just eat, open presents, and leave.), we got back in the car again on January 1 of 2010 for another hour and a half trip home. And on the drive home, Lisa and I passed the time by talking about the new decade that was beginning on that day.

"Wow," I said to her as I drove. "I can't believe it's 2010. We're leaving the--what do you call them?--the Zeroes--I guess--and headed into the--the what?--'the Tens'? 'The Teens'? It can't be 'the Teens' because those won't start until 2013. I mean, say what you want, but 2011 and 2012 aren't 'teen.' So I guess it's the 'Twenty-tens,' huh?"

My wife, who is used to me getting lost in meaningless semantics, didn't even address the issue. Instead, she said something like, "Yeah, we're already ten years into the 2000's." And then, after a moment of silence, "A lot has happened in the last ten years."

"And a lot is GOING to happen in the next ten years," I said to her.

And at that point we began listing all of the things that we assumed were going to happen between 2010 and 2020. Both of our children were going to graduate from high school. One, and maybe both of them, would graduate from college and get a job and move completely out of the house. In 2018 I'll be eligible to retire from public education in Kentucky, so by 2020 I would either be retired or at least mulling over my options. We might be retired and back at Vent Haven, working on the museum. Or we might be living in Key West in a condo. Things were going to be different, though, for sure.

We drove for a few moments in silence before I said, "You know, between now and then, we're also almost certainly going to bury at least one of our parents. Probably two. And maybe more than that." She agreed, and we then--being the morbid people we can sometimes be--spent the next several miles of the drive trying to figure out the order in which that would happen.

My point in telling that, I guess, is that the death of one of our parents didn't sneak up on Lisa and me. We knew one or more of our parents were going to die during the decade, but we didn't expect it to happen so quickly. Eleven months and a day after that conversation was the day of my father's funeral. And here we are now, in early January of 2012, and my mother--whose birthday celebration had been the cause of that trip two years ago--is in the hospital for the second time in less than a month, and she's not doing well. I don't know if she'll ever leave the hospital, and if she does, I don't know if she'll ever recover and be the person she was before going in.

It's been an absolutely terrible couple of days since my mother went back into the hospital, and if you've never lost a loved one, I probably can't convey the sense of it to you, and if you have, then you don't need me to. But it's changed my whole perspective about my father's death. I used to think it was so unfair that my father died so suddenly. My sister said she had a sense of his death a full day before he died, and I knew the night before he died--when I saw him in the intensive care unit and told him that I loved him but I wasn't going to kiss him because I didn't want him to catch my cold--that I might never get to kiss him again, but with even that little bit of advanced knowledge, his death seemed too sudden. He had been doing so well two days before, and most of the family didn't get to say goodbye to him.

But that's not been the case with my mom. From late Saturday until about noon today she got steadily worse, and by this morning it was apparent that things weren't going well. More than that, she was suffering. Truly suffering, something that my dad had only experienced for a brief period of time before his death. She's been laboring to even take a breath for days now, and it's been painful to watch. Gut-wrenching. And most of the relatives came by today and saw her, and looked her in the eye when they left and said something along the lines of, "I'm leaving now. Goodbye. You KNOW I love you so much," and my mother was able to tell them that she loved them, too.

In a way it's beautiful, I guess. And touching. And sweet. But she's been suffering so much, and without batting an eye I would give up all of the goodbyes and kisses and the gentle rubs on her forehead if it could take away her suffering.

Having written all that, I can say that--between the time that I started this blog entry (a little after noon today) and right now (10:35 PM), she's actually improved quite a bit. She might actually pull through. And if she does, she's got the Internet at her house, too! She's going to get home, read this blog post, and the next time I visit her she's going to hit me on the head with a rolled up newspaper and say something along the lines of, "You thought that I was going to die! And you wrote about it in your blog for the whole world to see! I'm going to KILL you!"

I hope that day comes, and if you're a religious person and so inclined, I'd appreciate your prayers for my mom's recovery. Ten hours ago I would have told you I was sure that it wasn't going to happen. Now I'm not so sure. But there is one thing that I AM certain of: Understanding that your parents are going to die someday, and being prepared for it--those are two different things....