Anonymous
To all the friends and family, thank you for celebrating Mom's life.
I wanted to share her service.
2008 has been a rough year for Mom. Multiple hospital stays, multiple surgeries, multiple infections, blood clots and pneumonia. She was doing so good. With all that behind her we knew she'd be able to go home soon after Memorial Day.
We took her camping Memorial Day weekend at the river. This was place she enjoyed. To watch the water, have a fire and visit with family.
I have a theory about what happened last Saturday. Pop needed a partner for playing cards and dice and Mom heard his call.
As we grow up we depend less and less on our parents as we gain our independence and stretch our wings. And we set off to make our own lives. Mom is still very important, but we make our own decisions and our own mistakes. And we hope we can do as good a job with our own kids and lives as Mom did.
With Mom staying with us during her recovery, we all have grown closer to her. A funny thing happens though. It makes you turn into a kid again and Mom is the Mom. And she moves into the role without skipping a beat. She'd ask questions like:
* Did you unplug the curling iron?
* Did you lock the door?
* Did the boys wear jackets to
school?
I asked my family what they remembered about Mom and their Grandma. Family gatherings, her floweres, her garden, the blue house on the lake, fuzzy tums in her pocket, pasting in S & H green stamps, grand kid cookies, the food, shopping, art fairs, dollars stores, did I mention the food?
Mom loved her flowers and having a garden. Her garden had shrunk in recent years to having a few tomato and pepper plants. When we lived in Muskegon on Vandenberg she always had a large garden and a strawberry patch. One year Mom had asked the neighbor if she could use a portion of his unused celery field to put in a garden. The celery fields were down the hill--where the bugs, quick sand and snakes are found. She hated snakes. What was she thinking! We hadn't been down there more than a few minutes when along slithers a snake. She killed the snake with a hoe. I don't know what left the biggest impression on me, my Mom hacking a snake into 2" pieces (just to be sure he was dead) or the fact that her knee caps vibrate rapidly up and down when she's scared. Needless to say we packed up our stuff and the large garden was not to be.
Mom and Pop had a cabin on Big Blue Lake in Fountain. It was more of a lodge than a cabin. It had 4 bedrooms, 2 baths and a 40' long living room across the front for viewing the lake. They would take the 5 youngest grand kids for the week end. April, Patrick, Lindsay, TJ and Chris. They always had a great time and the great memories of the fishing, swimming, boating at the blue house with Grandma and Grandpa will be theirs forever.
One of Mom's hospital stays required her receiving 19 units of blood before they could do surgery. We started to noice some slight personality changes. We would tease her about these. Maybe the donors of the blood were having an effect on Mom. Gary gave the personality a name "Margaret". Mom jumped on the band wagon with this. Whenever she felt a little mischievous she'd blame it on Margaret. When we would ask her to do something she didn't want to do she' blame it on Margaret. She once told Judy that Margaret didn' like her when Judy told her for the 3rd time it was time to take her pills.
Mom liked the family gatherings. They were good times. 3-4-5 conversations going on at one time (this really drives Gary nuts), grand kids running thru the house, the Christmas wrapping paper free for alls and of course the food. Enough to feed a small developing nation. We teased her that we needed to put a sign out front for the $4.95 all you can eat buffet for the food that was left over.
You may have noticed the little black dog with Mom. I want to tell you the story behind the dog. Mom has a black poodle named Shadow. He was her rock after Pop passed away. Mom doted on him and he w