Happy 82, Mom

 Happy Birthday, Mom.

It's something of a bizarre comfort to me that I might be joining her at any moment. At this point, I take things day by day, knowing I'm on borrowed time. Mom's brain cancer didn't let her get past 66; she'd have been 82 today had she not had cancer. Maybe it's better this way: she got to miss all of the deep, bitter political divisions separating friends and families throughout the country. She worked inside one of the big unions—NALC (National Association of Letter Carriers)—and was a member of a smaller union-within-a-union: OPEIU, which would occasionally strike against NALC, thus destroying the myth of "gotta stick together" union solidarity. Had Mom lived, she and I would have found ourselves on opposite sides of the aisle despite her constant complaints about work, and despite her rather MAGA-sounding complaints about various aspects of American society. You can have MAGA leanings and still vote Dem: who you are politically comes down to, basically, how you vote (go ahead—argue details and semantics in the comments; I stand by that claim). Or maybe we'd have found a way to work things out between us: political opposites but still family. Family above all.

Anyway, it's another year without Mom. Had she lived to 82, she might still have been feisty like her unpleasant big sister (my aunt). Or, who knows? She might have mellowed out.

One thing I remember from the day Mom had her debulking operation (when the doc removed the majority of the initial tumor mass): she was lying on her gurney in a dark hallway, about to be rolled into an intensive-care room. Her gurney was against the wall to let passersby through; the family was gathered tightly around her bed. I took her hand and squeezed. She wordlessly, maybe reflexively, squeezed back. She was still in there somewhere. That may have been the first time I cried. The first of many times during her illness.