One Day at a Time

There is so much to say, yet words are never enough when it comes to love and grief. So many emotions to process – sadness, grief, anger, anxiety, guilt – so much that I’m often left numb and depressed, or just tired. We thought this website would be a way to pay tribute to you, to process our emotions and for all those who loved you to share our memories. I wish I had talked to you about it before you passed, but I hadn’t had the idea until after. I would never want to do anything you didn’t want or to disrespect you or your memory, so I hope you would have liked this.

There have been so many ups and downs over the past 5 years. I’ll never forget the day I received the phone call from you that they had found a mass during your ultrasound. That day changed all of our lives forever. It was one of the worst days of my life that has now only been superseded by your passing. You and Dad were supposed to move out to the NW to be with us and with your Grandchildren. Cancer changed everything. We’ve all been on an emotional roller coaster since that day – grieving the cancer, grieving the plans we had lost and fearing the worst. The blessing and curse of cancer is knowing the possibility of death is around the corner. It allowed us to spend as much time together as we could and appreciate what we had in the moment, but also created an aura of sadness and fear. I wish I had been better about being positive and being in the moment.

I’m so incredibly proud of the woman you were. You overcame many obstacles and challenges in your life. You learned and grew from your experiences rather than letting them break you. You were such a strong, wise woman and an amazing mother. You were someone to admire – a breaker of cycles. But, more than that, you always looked for the positive in things. You faced all your challenges head on, even when it came to cancer. You suffered so much over the last 5 years, but showed such courage and strength. I’m not saying you didn’t experience fear or sadness, of course, because we all did. But, even when we learned you were out of treatment options, you faced it so bravely. We all cried together, and more than once, but you faced it one day at a time as best you could.

The last 2 months have been some of the hardest days of my life. It is torture watching someone you love reach the end of their life, each day knowing there is nothing you can do and that the next day will likely be worse than the last. But, we still did our best to be together and make memories until the end. I am grateful for that. I’ll never forget watching the old movies with you, listening to music together or watching “butter-lady” do her thing.

I will do my best to honor your memory and to bring your kind-hearted, humorous and loving spirit into the world. We will continually remember you and share our memories of you. We will talk about you often to our boys to make sure they remember their Grammy who loved them so much. We will show them pictures of you and watch home videos. I know you feared they would forget you, but we won’t let that happen.

I wish there was more I could have done for you. I wish there was something I could have done to prevent this. Knowing death is an inevitable part of life, while giving some reprieve, still doesn’t minimize the pain or the feeling that we were robbed – robbed of your presence, robbed of a wonderful Grammy for our boys, robbed of the plans we had all made together. It’s hard to make sense of why such a wonderful person would be taken from us so early. It wasn’t meant to be like this, but this is the way it is. It’s hard to wake up every day facing the nightmare of you not being in the world. I’ll try to be as brave as you were, taking it one day at a time. I love you and miss you so much.