After I started this blog, life's path took a radical turn. It began at Christmastime 2009. There was something in the air and it wasn't evergreen and bayberry. Mom was not doing so well. I should have had more of a clue when I asked her what she wanted for Christmas dinner. No, it wasn't the standard turkey, or ham, or roast beef. She wanted spaghetti of all things. It would be our last real celebration together, one I will never forget. She would pass from this life the week before Easter. I like to think that she celebrated Easter in Heaven with her parents, her deceased children and grandchildren; a tumultuous celebration that cancelled out all the suffering and sorrow she knew while on this earth and wiped away all the tears she had cried.
I didn't just open a can of ready made sauce and cook some pasta. I made my from-scratch authentic sauce that takes two days and has onions, spices, fresh garlic, green peppers, Home grown canned tomatoes, homemade meatballs, shredded pork, and sweet Italian sausage. I learned to make it from my dear friends the Benedetti's when I was only seventeen. Christmas day was a very white Christmas and I carried Sauce, Pasta, and Bread a half block in a blizzard to Mom's overly warm home.
Over the next three months mom's energy increasingly failed, she was losing the will to go on, and she began to fall often. She would not ask for or accept help. I learned she was determined to clean the ice and snow off her car one day instead of waiting for me. She fell on the ice and crawled on her hands and knees to safety. That was my mom - stubborn as they come. Finally she was forced to ask for help. She took three falls in three weeks. The last one broke her hip and she could not get up. How she managed to pull herself to the phone in all that pain I will never know - stubborn courage - she always refused to let me get her "lifeline." At the hospital we learned she had undiagnosed metastasized cancer. We pinned her hip in surgery and brought her back to her home with its comfortable memories, friends, and surroundings. She was gone nine days later but not before a last word. One day she cried out: "God, why am I still here? I told you I was ready!"
Little did I know it, but my life over the next year would echo those words in modified form. "God, why am I here?" I was called to leave my comfort zone and enter a desert not of my choosing.
