A Really Bad Day

As the title says its amazing what can happen in 12 hours.  When I woke up at 5am things were all-in-all fair I would say.  I drove 50 miles to work like I do everyday and got a message from deeanna saying that our one boy James is home because he cant go back to school after his suspension until she has a face-to-face meeting with the assistant principal and was told that a phone conference would not suffice.  Our boy Stephen was home because his bus came a few minutes early and he missed it.  So I made the decision to leave work after being there an hour and driving 50 miles home so that the boys could get to school.  To recap only 4 hours have gone by and my day is damned inconvenient but not terrible.  At 9:30am when we get home we check the voicemail and there is a call from my younger brother saying that there is an emergency and to call him immediately.  I call him back and he lets me know that our mom is in the hospital AGAIN! (she was just in last month for pneumonia and they discovered a tumor in her lung)  She had slipped off of her chair at work and they called a code blue on her and had her taken to the hospital nearby and when she told them that she has been having trouble with her extremities not moving lately they ran tests including a CT scan of her head and found a tumor in her brain.  After listening to the doctor talk to her and talking about it with deeanna it sounds less than optimistic.  So over the course of a few hours my life went from normal (or what passes for normal for me anyway) to crushed.  I am the first to admit that I am a 'mamas boy' though no one has ever said it to my face in a teasing or insulting way.  I lost my father back in 1995 to cancer and an uncle to cancer in 1999.  I know in my heart that there is no more stubborn, cantankerous soul ever placed on this earth than my mother.  I have watched her go through many issues with her health over the last few years and watched her slowly wither away.  I am not naive.  I know that it is the order of things that we succeed our parents and that death is one of the very few constants in the universe.  It somehow at this moment offers me little comfort as I see my mother in agony, tubes sticking out from everywhere, having trouble breathing even on pure oxygen feeling how tired she is of fighting.  I feel helpless watching knowing that all I can do is hope that what life she has can be relatively free of pain and suffering and that when it is her time she will believe that she has gotten all the joy and happiness that she could with her remaining time.

Thank you