Get Your Cheer Gear On!

I was blown away that this entry about my mom was given a 'best of' by the Holidailies Reader's Panel. This picture was taken in 2000 around Christmas, obviously. Mom had her hair done and was wearing some seasonal earrings (click on the pic...those are snowmen, people!) and a sweatshirt with a cool Santa and some holiday socks you can't see. In a year she would look wan and drawn and, before the Christmas of 2002, she would be dead from compications of Multiple Myeloma. I have no doubt that the cancer was at work here but she was still holding up. Cheerful. Delighted with Christmas. My parents had moved the spring before to Austin. She's in my kitchen but we didn't cook there that holiday. (I only know this by looking back almost seven years in some ill-kempt archives.) Mom had made some food at her house the night before and we'd opened presents. On Christmas Day, when this was taken, we'd gone to the in-laws. I e-mailed this picture to relatives elsewhere as a Christmas greeting from Austin. Christmases fly by, with me motherless. I was a kid that needed mothering, I think. And I got a heavy dose from a beloved grandmother, my mom, my older sister and some aunts. My own life is racing to the end and if I still had my mother she'd probably be frailer than my dad. This morning he has added to his back pain a complaint about leg cramps. And yet he was cooking himself breakfast when I called.