For the Last Time

This photo popped up on my Facebook memories today. It's of Mama and the girls during a birthday lunch for her in Charlotte. I scanned the screen for the date. A year later she will have decided to stop the chemo and let the cancer do it's thing.  

Over the next month she'd feel great. I would come home one day to, "are we sure I'm still sick?" That night she would present John and me with a plan: she had already sold her car, so she would want to borrow one of ours to volunteer at the church office a few days a week. (She will have missed working a great deal.) 

John and I would exchange glances that said, "how exactly are we going to manage THIS one?" We'd put her off for a few days until things would start to go downhill, reinforcing that, yes, she WAS still sick.

We'd spend the next few months getting in lots of "lasts," though we wouldn't call them that. Road trips would be tough by then because she would never know how she'd feel on any given day. We would take a day trip to the mountains but only get as far as Saluda. She would have to see the hills for herself, as if she were storing up the memory for later.

Another time, we'd take an overnight trip to Myrtle Beach and stay where the Pavilion used to be. Her grandparents and parents had houses on Ocean Drive when she was young. She'd point over the dash to a parking lot where one of them used to be. We'd eat oysters at Ella's in Calabash like she did growing up.  I'd swipe a chair from the hotel patio so she could sit high up in the sand. I wouldn't know what she saw out over the water but she'd spend a lot of time looking. 

We'd have dinner at Open Kitchen, supposedly the first Charlotte restaurant to serve pizza back in the day. And where she and not-my-daddy sometimes double-dated. We'd order a little of everything and bring most of it home. She'd smile the whole time. Not for the food, though; for the memories that would replay behind her eyes.

Many people aren't so lucky. Either death happens in the blink of an eye or, by the time you see it coming, it's too late to do anything about it. Her slow death was hard, but I wouldn't trade that time. 

People say you're supposed to live each day like it's your last. Although I might regret it one day, I can't bring myself to do it. I'm too caught up with the pull of day-to-day life, and I always think I'll have time. (I know how dumb that is even as I write it.) But when I think about Mama's last year, it does help me reframe my life and think about how I want to spent my limited time and energy. All she wanted was to visit a few places that meant something to her, based on what she could physically do without being miserable. And although she didn't have much of a choice, that seemed to be enough for her.

What would I like to do while trying to not be miserable? What would you like to do?

Finish that novel...reconnect with an old friend...learn to cut a cartwheel...tell someone you love them.

Whatever you do, do it with a smile.

Thanks for reading.