A Difficult Week

Today started a difficult week for me. Today is my father's birthday and he would have been 80 years old if he hadn't died of an inoperable brain tumor at the age of 66. I learned about my father's brain tumor when I went to my high school reunion and ran into an old friend who told me she was sorry about my father. I didn't know what she was talking about until she explained to me about the cancer. My mother called me the night he was dying, but only because my aunt pushed her into it. I got to the house 45 minutes after he had died. I hadn't seen him in well over 15 years. I hardly recognized him. He died on the 29th of June.

My mother's birthday is the 27th of June...5 days after my fathers birthday and 2 days before he died. It will be 2 years since she died...on her birthday. My mother had osteogenesis imperfecta which made her bones very,very brittle. Her first broken bone was at the age of 2 weeks. They made a splint for her leg out of half a tongue depressor. I found it when I was cleaning out my mothers jewelry box. From November of 2003, to the day she died in June of 2004, she suffered 2 broken shoulder blades and a major stroke that left her unable to speak, read or write, but able to understand everything. She was just starting to work with the speech therapist and was excited about the things she was learning to write again when she fell and broke her hip. She died of apparent sepsis that they could not stop. She died between 3:00 am and 3:07 am...the only time all of us had dozed off the whole time we were with her in the hospital that weekend.

Despite the painful relationship, or lack of relationship, we had with each other over the years, I miss them both. I tried to be a good daughter and I'm sure they tried to be good parents. We just weren't able to put our differences aside and we've all just had to live with the sadness of that.