(May 2019)
“I feel like tonight we’re just our normal selves,” my mom cheerfully called to me as she took a strawberry for her evening snack. Indeed. It’s been a lovely couple of hours because it has been so very ordinary.
We ate sweet potato nachos with avocado on the side for dinner. I held the cumin and cayenne that give the recipe its memorable kick because Mom’s Ohio taste buds are set. Keeping to the bland garners, “Oh, wow - this meal is excellent!” And she genuinely means it.
Afterwards, I sit and read When Breath Becomes Air while drinking hot tea and remembering December 27, 2018 with Dr. Tatters. He sat with our family for 90 minutes, patiently explaining mom’s glioblastoma – how it works, what her brain surgery did and did not accomplish, and what kind of road lay ahead for us.
Mom does laundry, cleans dishes, whistles with carefree notes, and talks to Mollie, her dog, here and there.
All of this occurs during a lovely, moderately temperate evening, perfect for mowing or tossing a baseball or reading a book on the porch. It’s an evening at home with either hot tea or iced tea. It’s wonderfully long as the sun’s light still holds fairly strong even at 8:30pm.
Perhaps evening shall be like this for mom.
Long, lovely, and even ordinary. Do we really hope for anything more when the diagnosis drops and the months can be counted on fingers and toes?
We spend our lives educating, renovating, reproducing, remodeling, and remaking ourselves and our careers, all in an effort to be better, different, and more. Then the sun nods just enough downward that we realize what we most want is the ordinary gift of being. Or, the extraordinary which is experienced most sublimely in the ordinary.
We want shared meals and deep belly laughter and tears thick with love in the sunset season.
And we hope the sunset lingers long and moderately - for we have only just discovered the depths of ordinary life that had been illusive for so long.
Just now mom’s left hand moves to her left temple. She closes her eyes and bends her head downward like she’s peaking too far into the night ahead.
Wow.