My Momma

I am thinking that I probably won't ever stop thinking about my Mom and her life.  At this point she has been filling my thoughts a lot.

Mom passed away on May 18th, 2014. Losing her is still too fresh to me to forget --- on a daily basis.  I knew that we were in her last days and it was Sunday morning. If it were totally up to me I would have went to sit with her instead of getting ready to go to church that morning. No one knows how long one will linger in the last days of life so that morning I slowly got up and began to get ready for church knowing that after service I would be going directly to her side where I knew I would find my sister Kotya too.

Mom had been having trouble breathing that week. She would grab a fistful of her skin on her thigh and pinch-squeeze.  That concerned us. I will never know why she did that because in mom's last to at least six or more months she had lost her voice and could not communicate vocally. I had thought of trying to teach her sign language but even that seemed a hard task to attempt. Mom had been diagnosed with dementia. After all the years rubbing elbows with the elderly in different hospitals and assisted home settings since I have been Mom's main support I have come to believe that we all, or many of us, will travel that same forgetting road.  It is a rotting world we live in and even the mind will succumb to disease along side the organs and limbs when we also grow old.

Writing is very therapeutic to me.

I used to write a lot here on blogger.com before my life was filled with Mom. She came to us one day after she had left the house her family had built for her. She left one summer day because of my alcoholic brother.
Unless you know the history of Mom's health (which even I at that point was not aware of) you wouldn't realize the feat of wonder it was for her to walk at least two miles to a small country store where she sat down with her old dog Odessa. She said that Odessa had told her that it was time to leave their home after my brother had threatened to hurt them both. (He was drunk.)  So Mom and Odessa walked away.  That day, via the local police and my sister Mom eventually came to me and Odessa was taken to the dog pound.   "She was pretty old," Mom said. "Odessa needed to rest now," she said.

In the first year that I began to help Mom with her life I learned that she had recovered from five strokes all by herself. I can remember how tired she used to be. When I was told that I could understand because I know others that have been hospitalized for one stroke, Mom had five.

I will write more another day.

I love and miss you so much Momma.

Mom was 83

It Was A Nice Thanksgiving

We enjoyed our day. I was busy all day preparing food and doing last minute clean ups. I always wonder how our house gets messy because we don't have any more kids at home! That Doug!! :-D

I hope you all had a great day too.

The Widow Maker

Doug and his bass.

Okay I have been off the blog net for quite a while! So much has happened since my last post and not all good.

The one event that has impacted my life the most is the sudden heart attack that my husband had on October 5, 2013. It is still very recent but because my husband was so active and in health he has recovered almost completely. We just went to see his regular doctor last week and he pointed out the evidences of continued heart trauma that occured when his heart was without oxygen.

Life without my husband would have been song-less! I can't imagine life without him at this point. I know there are very many brave ladies (and men) out there that have been given the awful situation of losing a mate and then continued on with life alone, my heart goes out to you. 

The doctor said Doug had the bad one of all heart attacks, "the widow maker" but because everything clicked along really quickly after I called 911 he has little damage to recover from. I am very thankful for our paramedics doing their job so well.

It is a very serious condition. If the artery gets occluded completely and all at once then you'll be having a massive heart attack which is very likely to lead to a case of sudden death.

I highly encourage anyone that suspects anything going on with their heart not to delay getting seen by someone that can tell you what is going on. Call 911 quickly, it may be the difference between life and death or a life with a lot of recovery.

Today I am very grateful that my husband is still around here and he is doing well.

Thank you kind Shepherd, You have been very kind to us.

Memory Lane

Today I got a message on Facebook from my nephew Brandon. He was working on an oral report and asked about my Dad's house in Old Harbor and what had happened to it after the earthquake and tidal wave of 1964. Boy, that got me back into the past. Old pictures, old times, Old Harbor.

I was thankful to find that I had a picture of the house my Dad built in Old Harbor. When my youngest brother Mark was still alive my Mom normally lived at the same small house he was at. This house was built by our family for Mom after my Dad died. It ended up that Mark lived there and in 2010 he died there. (Boy does time fly!) After Mark died my husband Doug and I ended up being the ones that cleaned up the house and took care of Mark's animals. Since there would be no one living there after we moved Mom out into an assisted living facility Doug drained the pipes and winterized it. There it sits to this day. If I had the money I would pay the taxes on it and I would make it liveable again. Alcoholism is tough on material possessions!

We went through what little paperwork we could find that looked important then brought them home with us in case it was needed for Mom's future. We arranged with the neighbors to check the mailbox every so often and we stopped by there to pick it up, when needed.

As Doug was picking things up in the yard he found a garbage container filled with trash and in it was some photographs! This sort of stuff happens when someone is alcoholic. I am so glad that Doug checked this stuff and salvaged the pictures. They are precious to me, even this one picture of the house that Dad built. One thing that was not salvageable was the big bear hide that my brother owned from a hunting trip that he went on. It was wet after sitting in the drip of the eave for we don't even know how long. Sad to let things go that would have been a link to someone you loved. But when death is fresh on your heart it is hard to think of 'stuff.' So we left that behind but brought some of the old pictures home from the trash barrel.

Shortly after my brother died my Mom lost her mind. Maybe this is a protection? Personally, I believed she had suffered a stroke, but the doctor said there was no sign of any NEW strokes. He did tell me that it appeared that she had survived five strokes in her past and that she had recovered from them without medical care. Mom does not even remember Mark right now. She asks once in a while who the boy was that used to live at her house. " It was Mark, Mom." "Mark?" It is amazing to me how she forget someone that had such a big part of her every day.

I have a new laptop and my first ever web cam. :-) I was trying to figure out how to get my pictures from my phone to my laptop, and saw the webcam. So there you have it. A new way to take a picture of an old house.

Ha ha!