Time

Today would have been my mom's birthday, she would have been 93, but she passed 13 years ago, at 80. It doesn't seem like it has been that long to me, sometimes when I am half asleep I hear what sounds like her voice, but it is R, my daughter, that I hear. Lots of mom's ancestors lived to be into their 90s -- her mom died at 98, and doing genealogy I find many who lived to over 100, remarkable for the time when medicine was so primitive, if available at all. Mom was born in 1918, the year of the big flu epidemic that swept the world, especially in England. Her folks lived on a farm here in West Virginia, and certainly benefited from limited exposure to travelers and such. She had a twin, but her sister (my aunt) died at 57 from a stroke, so 80 was pretty remarkable given that Mom had diabetes and a bad heart.

I had a second transfusion and will probably need another, if my extreme fatigue is anything to go by. The oncologist doesn't seem too concerned, although he says many have the entire 6 cycles and never need blood, but I try not to read anything dire into his comments. I worked in the blood bank at the hospital for 5 years or so, and the vast majority of blood was used by bone marrow cancer patients, post ablation of their own bone marrow. That, and extreme bleed-outs from trauma, which were always a crisis for us, especially on weekends when there were only two of us in the blood bank. Glad all of that is over and done with, I can't imagine having that kind of stressful job now, tho it seemed OK at the time.

I've been slowly (very) organizing our photos from the last 30 years - I should say, ours + my parents' + N's parents' + my grandmother's photos. I did real well there for a while, but now it feels like such drudgery with no end in sight. I gave up on chronological sorting and went with categories like horses, pets, our kids, family and (drat) miscellaneous, for each collection. When the kids were small, I always got triple prints made and sent one set off to the grandparents, and now I have three prints of each back again, in no particular order. The albums that I do have are just going to stay the way they are, even tho a lot of what is in them is meaningless now -- flowers, friends, photos too dark, too light, bad exposure, etc. and I am rigorously throwing away all the negatives. And if it is a photo I took, and even I can't identify who or where or when, out it goes. I have 6 huge plastic tubs to go through, and if I don't do it now, when would I?

I can't think of what I wanted to write here, so I'll post this for now and stick the rest on above or within this once my chemo brain spits the topic out.

Bumper sticker for the day: " The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age."