birthday

It's my Mom's birthday today; she would have been 65. It's hard to imagine her being that age (she died from cancer thirteen years ago). In my mind's eye, I imagine her being exactly the same, just with a little more grey in her hair.

I wonder if Mom ever felt ripped off, having her birthday and Mother's Day (which is this Sunday) so close together? We didn't really appreciate her back then; she did all the housecleaning and cooking for the family, except for those rare special occasions. like her birthday and Mother's Day, when she got to sit back and watch us making a huge fuss over something she did on a daily basis.

For the first few years after Mom died, my strongest memories of her were the images I remembered from the hospital, of her lying in her blue hospital gown, mouth half-open, eyes open but staring into space.

I remember how once, when I thought she had been lost in her own morphine-induced dream world for weeks, I had whispered in her ear just for the heck of it, "Mom, can you hear me? If you can hear me, blink your eyes". We had all been taking turns sitting by her side reading to her, talking to her, staring out the hospital window at the snow.

We had a ghetto blaster softly playing Mom's favourite music; someone had told us that the hearing is the last thing to go in cases like my Mom's, but I had strong doubts that my Mom was aware of anything in those last weeks.

Which was why I was so shocked when, in response to my question, my Mom deliberately blinked her eyes once. Not just blinked, but squeezed them shut very hard and then opened them wide again, as if to make very sure that I couldn't mistake it for a coincidence.

And then I was horrified, struck by the realization that my Mom had probably been aware of everything that had been going on around her this entire time these past weeks, aware of the pain in her body and of the fluids building up in her lungs as she struggled to keep breathing, aware that she was dying.





I talked to her a lot more after that, but she never responded to anything else again. Just that one blink, and that was it. I had nightmares a lot back then and after she died, mainly focussed on that one acknowledgement of awareness, that last heartbreaking attempt to communicate ("I'm still here!") before she finally faded away.

It's a strange experience for me as I browse through old family albums, seeing Mom as a young girl. At my age, Mom had already moved away from her home country to marry someone she had never met and had had three children.

It took many years, but my happier memories of Mom have came back, memories of how she sounded when she laughed, how comforting her cool hand was on my forehead when I was sick, how she used to tell me stories from Japan. I want to remember her the way she would have wanted to be remembered.

If Mom was alive today, I would have liked to take her out to lunch, maybe to Fune, and ask her all the questions I've been wondering about as an adult: What was her childhood in Japan like? What was it like coming here? Had she been happy? Did she harbour secret regrets? I just wish I had grown up enough before she died to get to know her better, if that makes any sense at all.

(Today's entry is part of an On Display collab. Topic: "Moving on/moving away".)

---

My audit paper-digging is going pretty well, considering how innately disorganized I am and the fact that I handed over most Inkspot-related papers to Xlibris when they acquired Inkspot. I'm also grateful to old Inkspot helpers who still had their invoices from that time!

I'm really missing my writing. :-(

Hopefully the papers I drop off at my tax lawyer's later this week will be enough to make the CCRA happy, and I can get on with my life.

---

Today's Blatherpics:

	Mom cooking in the kitchen when I was five months old.
	Ruth, me and Jim.
	Sara demonstrating her climbing abilities on Sunday. She can climb pretty much anything these days. (That's Andy in the background)