Three Years cannot erase a Lifetime of Memories...

Three Years ago, the world lost a friend, a mother, a grandmother, a lover...a fighter.
Three years ago today, lost to a courageous battle with the vicious disease known as Lung Cancer, my mother took her final breath.  Her beauty ever etched in our minds as we spent those last days, weeks and few months with her.  Holding her hand when we could, helping her when she needed it, sharing stories of the past brought to the forefront by this silent killer.  Laughing at the audacity of it all...after all those years smoking, AFTER she quit it decided to rear its ugly head. Irony in its truest sense. Pathos in its entirety.
There were words left unsaid, regrets for sure..but there was love never ending.  The moments shared can never be erased, the challenges brought us together, yet tore us apart at the same time.  Each to withdraw into a period of "Why?", strength drawn from life lessons learned we have endured the period after, and we walk through the days with our heads held high, knowing that although she may have shaken her head at some of our choices, where she may have screamed in her loudest mom voice "What the heck were you thinking?"...Mom would have been there to encourage, to laugh, to embrace us one and all.  She would have walked through it with her unbreakable resolve and knowing we may have erred yet again...at the end of it all, she would continue the fight valiantly.  She was an indelible force that we lived, learned and loved.

The laughter was contagious, the memories countless...but there was love never ending.  She was my best friend, my confidante, my hero.  She was everything I wanted and didn't want to be.  She was a rock to all who knew her, and she was at the heart of it all.  Although it may never again be "how she would have done it..." it is what it is, and it with her tenacity and courage we live this life knowing that one day our paths will cross again...and damn is that kick in the but going to hurt...lol!

Three Years ago today, the family I grew up believing was invincible fell apart, never to be truly whole again...but like the lessons she taught us, we will grow older knowing we were blessed by the best of them, and truly special in her eyes.  We all have our own memories, shared little secrets of time well spent, and the knowledge that there we things we could have done better...but at the end of it we also know we had a friend, a mother, a partner, a grandmother, a confidante...A HERO of the best kind, my Mom.

Gone but never forgotten   Barbara Ann Cadogan  July 16th, 1944 ~ January 27th, 2008