Tenderfoot Diaries

Just over a week ago, I issued a Challenge on the OBS blog.   The subject of the Challenge was one I felt strongly about, and one that I knew had impacted a lot of outdoor bloggers including myself.  I figure  some of the OBS members will write some very personal stories and given that, I feel it is only fair that I share mine.

My mother and I didn’t always have the easiest relationship when I was growing up.  We were, to use a British saying, as different as chalk and cheese.  Everything she cared about meant nothing to me.  Everything I revered she thought odd.  We spent a lot of time talking at instead of to each other.

If there was one comfort during the troubled years of our relationship it was this, I knew we had tons of time.  After all, the women on my mother’s side of the family lived forever.  In fact, I used to joke that you had to hit them over the head with a mallet to take them out.  I had great aunts who lived into their late nineties.  My maternal grandmother lived to be 98.   I had no reason to expect or believe that my mother wouldn’t do exactly the same thing.

Until I did have reason.

Mom was diagnosed with liver cancer in the late 90’s.  By the time they found it the cancer was very advanced.  Liver cancer is also one of the hardest cancers to treat and has a very high fatality rate.   The doctor who diagnosed Mom gave her six months to live.  I’m guessing, privately, he thought she had less.

The cancer fought hard, but Mom fought harder and bought herself three more years.  If it can ever be said that good can come out of something horrible, then those three years were an awful lot of good.  Since I knew our time was limited, and that perhaps I wouldn’t have the luxury of years to make amends, I said what needed to be said, apologized when apologies were due, and got to know my mother in a way I never had before.  It wasn’t all roses and sunshine, in fact a lot of it sucked monumentally, but I finally made peace with Mom and with myself.

Mom died in 2002.   It wasn’t a gentle death or an easy one.  The cancer robbed her of her speech and her coordination and finally her life.   The jokes I’d made about having to take the women in my family out with a mallet suddenly didn’t seem so funny.  At that time, pretty much nothing seemed funny.

My mother, Glenda Ackerman Shreve Fosgitt was 56 when she died.

We should have had more time, but  cancer came along and suddenly everything was different.