Last week something happened that knocked me on my heels and reinforced my appreciation of great mothers.

I have noticed that great mothers have an innate ability to either say or do the right thing during especially troubling times for their children and that while these things might not make all things instantly right with the world, they do make it more tolerable.

My mother passed in 2007 and one of the great things she did for me was how she created these journals or diaries during the last couple of years of her life. In one of them, she explicitly wrote what she wanted to be done upon her passing and added her own list of "do's and don't's" and this made her passing much more manageable. 

Then, last week I went to visit an eighty-one-year-old elderly widow who has known me all my life and was a lifelong childhood friend of my mother.  She has been disabled from strokes, losing the use of half of her body since the 1980s, and had to be moved to a nursing home after no longer being able to adequately take care of herself. 

She and her husband had three sons.  Her middle son, one of my best friends, was going to take care of her after her other two sons became estranged (with all the blame on them), but he passed in 2019.

During these past three years, she has become weaker and in need of more care, and after becoming ill and dehydrated, her Grandaughter and in-laws had to make the needed, but unfortunate decision that it was time for assisted living.

A week ago this Tuesday, I went to visit her and it crushed me to see her in this environment and how she has aged even more since my last visit to her home in November.  The sunken valleys between the joints on the back of her hand had grown so deep and her legs were so thin, with bones throughout her body being more pronounced while pushing through the paper-thin skin lacking in muscle. 

We sat and talked and reminisced and I told her of a recent kayak trip I took to an island in the middle of a river her son and I used to go to for camping.  She acknowledged that she was just waiting to die and then, upon seeing my distress over her declining condition and my despair over the feeling of powerlessness, in a moment of utter gracious absolution on her part, she simply replied, "You can't fix everything."

That simple line both crushed me and provided such peace I find it hard to adequately describe.

Only great mothers have such an ability and I hope everyone here has a remarkable person like this in their lives somewhere.