Womenetics: There’s a photo of my mom I love looking at. In it, she’s standing some distance in front of two Egyptian pyramids a squinty smile lurking quietly beneath her oversized sunglasses. Although she didn’t travel until later in life, when physical limitations made global excursions more challenging, the international experiences were important to her, and she made the most of each journey. Of that, I have no doubt.
There’s another image, though, that often haunts me, even though it lives only in my mind’s eye. In this one, she’s lying in a hospital bed, panic written in her eyes, wanting desperately to go home. She was nearing the end of her battle with a chronic form of leukemia and in significant pain. Watching her panic, elicited my own. While I knew she would never go home again, I can’t say with any certainty whether she suspected that, too. We simply didn’t talk about that.