Always Remember to Respect and Honour Your Mother

You don’t see pics of me here much. The rare ones feature me and Jake. So this is a quick break to say hi to my mom, Jean. I always liked this picture of her on the water at Fort Walton Beach, Florida. She’s responsible for my love of all things water-based…oceans, bays, lakes, rivers, seas, bayous, ports, streams. Our skin was so brown in those summers. Did “SPF” even exist back then?

Eight years ago, Dad suddenly called us all home. Mom had reached the final days of her long illness. My plane landed in Florida and I went straight to the house. It was filled with family and friends and boiled shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico. I talked to her for awhile the night I arrived and loved her sharp sense of humor, even through the morphine haze. She soon went to sleep that night and I thought we would continue the conversation in the morning. For the next three days, she slept but we never talked again. I just sat on the bed with my dad, sister and brother, playing games, watching TV, and waiting. On the morning of August 16th, I watched her take her last breath, much like she watched me take my first. Jake came home from the breeders a few weeks later and everything hurt just a tiny bit less.

On vacations now, when I step onto a beach for that first moment, I feel the sand against my feet and I swear I if I turned around just then, I might see her behind me on a lounge chair, auburn hair and olive skin, peering over a book and smiling. If our Mother’s Day post wasn’t enough to make you stop and call YOUR mom, do you think you might go do it now?