Jackie told me there'd be days like this..... She said early on that one issue in dealing with mom's death that you have to go through is the cycle of the year. And while I know i've been through this, there's definitely a difference in losing mom and losing dad. Boy when she's right...

So I got through Valentine's Day, a day of cards and flowers in our family. I recently had to tell the florist for a second time to stop sending me stuff, at least for now. I know how to find them if I need to. And Valentine's Day is a squishy day chez roscoe. Also a day which usually adds to the soft toy menagerie, so it certainly wasn't all sayd. Look, new monkeys!

But the foofarah of Mother's Day is hard to avoid, between running to Walgreens yesterday to pick up four (eu) refills. And Facebook wants us to post mom's picture. And one of the games I play is full of mother's day stuff. So it's time maybe to hunker down a bit and avoid what triggers the weepies.

I used to read books where a character was not aware she was crying and thought it very odd, by the way. No more. And i tear up at the drop of a fill-in-something-ordinary.

But what this post is really about is not my mother so much as it is about my sister because while I've said it to her, it's worth saying out loud to folks who read this blog (and again, wow, thank you. Who ARE you guys?) because what Pat did (sorry I have trouble calling her Patricia, but I think she's okay with that, at least for a while) when she relocated from Boston, moving what three blocks? from my mother is that she gave mom another year and a half. We all knew mom was not well. We all probably, in our minds, wondered. I know I still jump when the phone rings, it's so ingrained in me to worry still.

But Jackie, as she said at the funeral, often became mom's caretaker as well as her friend. And she noted she preferred the friend spot but no one can count how many times she came running. She was my surrogate but more because a) I could not have done the stuff she did and b) mom and Jackie were friends and friends is different. She could, and did, say things to my mother that i could not say. They talked about things that interested them, which might not have interested me. She was hugely helpful, yes, but they went back years and years so it was more than being "helpful" and had history and friendship that i could not offer. So I forget if you've hear me tell about how Jackie became my step-sister, but she is.

And then there's my sister Pat who, I'm guessing, and I think she has said as much, had no idea what she was getting into when she relocated to West Hartford after living in Boston for 23 years. She was a lifeline for our mother. She did EVERYthing and went pretty much EVERYwhere to do what mom could not do. Mom became pretty housebound in the last few years. She didn't drive, she was finding it harder and harder to do things, she was exhausted so much of the time. But until her death, she was in the place she loved - that condo was her favorite find of all the cool places she had lived. That gorgeous yellow paint on the walls was her choice. Who knew?

I had a hard time getting back there for a number of reasons. i hope this one makes sense - I knew I could not do for her. She always insisted on doing everything for me and i could not get her to stop, even when it sent her to bed or the hospital. She would not let me do stuff. Until that last visit in December 2009 where finally...ok except she insisted i have her bed, and she slept on the couch in the den. And there was no arguing with my mother. Not for me. Jackie? Jackie could tell her things i could not.

But Pat was there all the time, doing everything that mom wished she could still do. Mom probably would have been in trouble, have had to go into assisted living (oh, she needed to anyway but) had my sister not been there for her. And mom fought that idea always. She wanted to live on her own. And Pat's being there allowed her that, well, that privilege. I told my sister back in January that I hope she knew, she realized that she had given mom all that extra time. Maybe more - maybe by being there she extended mom's life in a sort of algorithmic way, you know the way the Richter scale works (sorry if that sounds really dopey. You know what i mean though right?) Mom gave in on some things, finally allowing the library to deliver books, something I'd try to set up for her a while before. I sent her every book i could find that i knew or thought she'd like, even knowing that reading was starting to not work for her, but hey, even a few pages, still mattered to a lifelong reader like mom. And in the last year or so, i learned that she loved salt-water taffy. Really? And i tried to make sure I sent flowers on more than the three holiday rotation of Valentines/Mother's/Birthday. But nothing helped her like my sister being there. Both in her presence and in her daily caretaking from bank to pharmacy to Whole Foods to whatEVER Mom needed. Pat saw that she got it, that it happened. And was there what, almost every day. Mom seriously enjoyed that so much. It was so meaningful and important to have that time with her older daughter.

So while I am trying not to mind all the Mother's Day crap, I'm minding it. What can i say?

Still, it's not all sad because as it turns out, Mother's Day for me is about sisters, this year.