by Cindy Thrasher

Created on: June 12, 2008   Last Updated: August 10, 2009

It was a nippy day in January and my mother was dying. The tumor in her lung that had lain miraculously dormant for a decade had abruptly come alive and begun to grow, complicating her already fragile respiratory system. My sister and I, keeping watch, wandered in and out of her room, feeling powerless and unprepared for what was inevitably bearing down on us. This particular morning, I walked in to find her dozing peacefully, her thin, still-dark hair resting against the white pillow that framed her gaunt, pale face. As I sat down on the edge of her bed, resting my arms on either side of her smallness, she opened her sunken eyes and looked at me.

"Good morning," I said. "How are you doing?"

She blinked. "Fine."

And then, daring to do the unthinkable, I said, "I love you."

Her reply to me was so typical of someone raised in hard times. "You must, to have put up with all this without one word of complaint."

Complaint?! If she only knew how many times in the last ten years I had wanted to complain! She always left the refrigerator door open too long while she struggled to pull the mustard out with arthritic, twisted hands that refused to obey. There were the trips to her doctors' offices, the medication that had to be picked up, and the inconvenient hospital stays of at least a week when she developed her annual bouts with pneumonia. There were the weekly trips to Wal-Mart, walking behind her at an agonizingly slow pace as she pushed the shopping cart that doubled as a walker methodically up and down each and every aisle, looking at everything that her petite 4-foot 8-inches allowed.

Oh, how I had wanted to complain! When I was growing up, there was no escaping her. I used to walk across the street to Vicki's house (or around the corner to Gail's, or next door to Debbie's) to play dolls, and I would cringe when I heard the phone ring. There was a 99.9% chance it was Mom on the other end, telling whoever answered to send me home because I had forgotten to make my bed, or finish my homework, or wipe down the table after lunch. I couldn't do anything the other kids in the neighborhood could do, like loiter around the 7-11 or King Sooper's, or stay up past nine o'clock on summer nights. The eyes in the back of her head were 20-20, and I hated it. Now, here she was, living in my house full time and I couldn't escape. It didn't matter that I was a middle-aged, married woman with children and grandchildren; I still felt guilty if I fell short of the standards she

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