The past 12 months plus has had some highs but a lot of lows and challenges, too and the stresses continue, but I am pressing on with God's help each day; sometimes I take it one hour at a time and sometimes I take it one moment at a time.
Timeline to give you some perspective of my story. My Dad passed away very suddenly Aug 2011; my Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer early 2012 and her Mom (my Grandma Mason) passed away May 2012. Mom underwent horrific chemo and radiation treatment and mastectomy of one breast and the chemo left her heart damaged. Mom maintained an amazing attitude as always and recovered from her surgery and treatment and we thought she had beat the horrible disease. My family and I (husband Peter and step-daughter Chasely) travelled to Canada in December 2013/January 2014 to visit Mom and family and friends and later in 2014 Mom learned that the cancer had metastasized to her liver, kidney and blood. Not the news Mom or our family wanted to hear. Mom had a couple of chemo treatments but these were to go on for many weeks and the odds of remission very low and had made her very sick in a very short time frame, so Mom opted for quality of life. What an incredibly brave woman our Mom was and to her dying day.
I flew to Canada early Feb 2015 which enabled me to spend some quality time with Mom and those memories will always be so precious to me. I am so grateful for the time I was able to spend with Mom and the opportunity to be able to help her in the days leading up to her passing. A friend gave me some great advice and that was to journal about my visit with Mom - precious writings, indeed. Many special moments shared. Another friend encouraged me to video Mom, too along with the photos I took and one of my projects is to create a movie of Mom (but I think I will need to invest in a new computer to do that - my faithful notebook/laptop that still uses XP is close to calling it quits I think).
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| My beautiful Mom and I - we had lunch with her Red Hat Mama's. |
