My Mom
By Pinkmonkeyy
My mom was a wonderful person who loved life. She loved to cross stitch and she always smelled like warm milk and coffee, she loved taking care of my brother and I. But little did I know my life was about to turn upside down.
When I was four, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctors told her it was not serious and a few treatments of chemotherapy would do the trick. After a while she started losing all of her hair. She bought some wigs but she preferred a cream colored hat with little arrangements of light pink sequins in the shapes of little roses.
I was in kindergarten at the time. My classmates always wondered why my mom always wore a hat. I never told them the real reason. I always managed to change the subject. I did this because everyone else’s mom had a full head of hair. I did not want to be the odd girl with a bald mom I wanted to be a normal girl.
Shortly after my mom got really sick, she had a seizure in the middle of the night. I remember the lights and sirens outside of my window, I saw my mom on a stretcher. Men were carrying her into an ambulance. A few minutes later my dad walks into my room first, then he walks into my brother’s and says “get your shoes on”. On the car ride back from the hospital, thoughts were racing through my mind “is she going to die”?
I was very worried, I felt like I was trapped in a box and water was rushing in. Soon after she was put on seizure medication, and put in an assisted living home. This place was like a prison. You had to type in a code to get in. The place smelled of soap and death. After a while she developed a tumor in her brain. I always pictured this tumor as a big scary black serpent that slithered through my mom’s body “eating” up her insides
Soon the tumor started messing up her brain making her language jumbled. The tumor also affected her memory sometimes she would forget our names. The first time I saw my mother like this I felt like she was a totally different person. She wasn’t the proper English speaking person I knew, a few months ago. She was this new person who struggled with simple sentences. After I saw her like that I really started worrying. I cried quietly in class with my head down.
Kids in my kindergarten class talked about me behind my back , I pretended not to hear their jabbing remarks like “what is wrong with her”? and “she is such a crybaby”! Obviously they did not know the pain I was going through. Little did I know that the pain was going to get much worse. As the weeks past by my mom’s cancer was getting worse every day.
One bright sunny July morning we drove up to the home, I felt a pang of tense emotion in my chest. We walked in through the front doors, typed in the code until the now familiar green light flashed on and we walked through the second pair of glass doors that closed once we got in. We walked down the winding red corridor into room # 306, my mom’s room. My brother and I played in her room and we fed her lunch to her. Then we put my mom in her
wheel chair and took her out to the courtyard and pushed her around the red brick path, passing lush green grass and flowers of every sort and color. We went back inside she was smiling, she hardly ever smiled sense she got put in the home.
We talked to her and we took pictures of her beautiful smile. She chatted about the beautiful blue jay she saw outside in front of the big bronze bird feeder. She asked if we could do the exact same thing tomorrow my dad said “of course we can”! Sadly he never got to take her up on his offer because we stayed a little longer gave her hugs and kisses right before we left she died. That was the saddest most devastating day of my life. We were all sobbing. My dad was even crying. We left that awful place for the last time. I was glad she died happy.
On the day of her funeral everybody I knew was there. I looked inside her casket she was wearing a light pink dress and she held in her hands a bouquet of soft pink roses. She was also wearing a light brown wig that came to her shoulders.
I wish she could have lived longer on earth, but she still lives in my heart.