Deja Fu

Life really likes throwing curve balls. It really does.

I didn’t disappear, but I have been very, very distracted lately. Almost a year after we lost my Mom, Dad had a stroke and was hospitalized. Since then, I’ve temporarily moved in with him to assist in his recovery, which is coming along amazingly well. To top everything off, my XBox 360, which is over three years old now, coughed up an E74 error and died.

The consequence though, is that it took me three weeks to read a Discworld book, which, by rights, should have been devoured in a day or so. However, things are looking up on all fronts, and we’ve moved on, so although I doubt I’ll hit fifty-two book this year, I should be able to put in a good showing.

-K

After a short, but very brutal battle with cancer, my mother died this evening.

What started on August 20th as a chronic pain in her neck was initially diagnosed as a blood clot pressing against her spine. During the emergency surgery to remove the clot, the surgeon found a tumor wrapped around her spinal cord instead. More tests revealed small cell carcinoma in her lungs, adrenal glands, lymph nodes and on her pelvis.

She elected, as we all knew she would, to fight. However, the combination of radiation and chemotherapy had other plans. After her third chemotherapy session, she complained of wheezing in her chest. My father called her doctor and was told to take her to the emergency room for an evaluation. On the way, she went into cardiac arrest. The emergency room personnel managed to get her heart restarted, but not after she had suffered irreversible brain damage in her cerebellum and brain stem. She was no longer capable of regulating her heart, blood pressure and breathing. The only consolation, was that she was unconscious and unaware.

This afternoon, after getting all the tests and consultations, which resulted in the above diagnosis, we made the decision to discontinue her life support and she died a few hours later.

My father is very fond of saying, “If someone doesn’t like your mother, then they just don’t like people.” Those words are absolutely true. She was kind, gentle, friendly, loyal, funny, smart, sympathetic, etc., etc. She made everything better by simply being a part of it. In a family of three men and one woman, she made all of us better men than we would have been without her.

I can’t describe how much I’m going to miss her.

We made a connection back in 1999 that, frankly, surprised us both. While I have always been a voracious reader, she never was into the books I read, until I introduced her to Harry Potter. From the first book she was hooked and she got to share my love of books with me for the first time in my life. And she made reading Harry Potter even more fun because she enjoyed it as well.

We saw the movies together and were looking forward to the next one. Seeing it is going to be an exercise to watch the movie instead of remembering watching the previous five with her.

I can keep writing. I’ve got dozens of stories I could tell. However, right now most of them need to be kept with me because I’m not ready to let them go just yet.

And besides, she was the one who taught me the way to keep an audience was to hold back and entice them for more. Of course, she was talking about getting girls, but I figure it works for audiences of all kinds.

-K