John Kitsco

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Guess I should have known better when I wrote the first article
entitled: A few words on feelings of emptiness and loneliness.
I should have known what was coming. Yet, the beautiful and
heart wrenching encouraging words of Tender Heart who
wrote in her comments: "Oh John, I know what you are going
through. How I can relate. We will always love our moms...."
followed by Anita Dpacifichi who wrote, " John, such a heart-felt
story..."

I should have known better and somehow prepared better. I
found out from a phone call from my brother Ted that the
hospital called him and Mom was gravely ill and all the family
should gather around. Sorry, let me stop for more tears. This
is too hard...

Anyways, we all arrived just after 5:30 p.m. and Mom had
died. And I walked into the hospital and out in a fog. I was
speechless, breathless and moved like a zombie. Artificial.
Un-real. Frozen. Life-less. She was gone. Our Mom was gone.
And arriving back home was the right time (or so I thought)
to pull out all those old pictures.  But they just brought the
rush of tears, the abundance of wonderful memories bottled
up within this writer for so very long. Sorry, let me stop for
more tears. Sorry. How do you tell about your Mom. About
how she grew up quickly because her own Mom and Dad
were struggling on the farm and sent her north all alone to
work in some shanty hotel as a chambermaid. At age 16.
She died just before her 92nd birthday. What a life. The
hardship, watching her sister die from tuberculosis, watching
her brother pass on, her own mother die from a horrific hit
and run at a crosswalk. Her dad - from working deep under
ground in the coal mine and then her husband, from a stroke.
But still, the years were good. We all knew that. We all strived
to focus on the good, on the garden, on the Mom that never
stopped smiling even as she rested in the emergency ward of
the hospital, blood pressure high, blood pressure low, heart
strong, pneumonia, and a host of other things seemed to befall
her at this final moment, this final hour, this final day of her
life when she would leave us. We so love you Mom. We all so
love you and shall miss you so very very much. Sorry, the
tears are stopping me from telling you more. Is there more?
Of course there is, volumes and volumes of a life lived.
Oh Mom, forgive me for not spending much more time with
you - forgive me in whatever way I may have let you down.
Forgive me.