On this one year anniversary of my mom’s death, it is a bit easier to reflect on my mom’s life. She wasn’t perfect by any standards, but through thick and thin she was my mom.
My mom was an only child of an industrial arts teacher and a seamstress. My mom was married three times and had three children, me (being the oldest), my brother, and my half-sister. My mom loved raspberry scented products, quite often for birthdays, Christmas and Mother’s Day this was often the fail safe item to purchase. My mom loved gardening and snowman decorations. My mom loved her kids and grandkids. My mom loved cheese soup and green bean casserole. Whenever we had cherry pie, mom always ended up with the piece that had a cherry pit. Growing up mom took me to 4-H meetings, school activities, and sometime church activities. Growing up mom worked, but either mom or grandma always brought treats to school for our birthdays.
Mom was not always bright and cheerful, and we must always take the good with the bad. Mom started smoked around the time she was in junior high and smoked all her life. Throughout the years, I remember mom typically had a cigarette in one hand and a can of Coke in her other hand. She suffered from depression after her second marriage and became an alcoholic. She almost died in 2001. She ended up with polyneuropathy in her hands and feet, it took her three months to re-learn how to walk and write. She did change part of her ways and said that she quit drinking after she got married a third time.
In February 2010, mom was diagnosed with stage four lung and brain cancer. She had treatments of chemotherapy and radiation over an eight month period, but the cancer took her life one year ago today. She preceded grandpa in death by 52 days, although in the last few weeks she could not remember that he was gone. It is a weird feeling when you are on a first name basis with the caretaker of the cemetery, representative at the funeral home, and the representative at the monument company.
I miss my mom very much. Sometimes on the weekends, she would come over and help me clean and straighten the house. I would come home from work and mom would have stopped by and worked on sprucing up the flower beds. Mom loved to go to garage sales and would bring over clothes and toys for the kids. For birthdays and Christmas mom always made sure that she bought the loudest toys for the kids. Mom always made sure that the kids had shiny mylar balloons for their birthday parties.
So today on this first anniversary, we visited the graves of mom and grandpa. The flowers were changed and time was taken to personally reflect. Then we headed back home to spend time with family and ate cheese soup, French bread, caramel apple cake, and pumpkin pillows.
Cheese Soup
4-6 cups water
2 chicken bouillon cubes
3 stalks of chopped celery
1 large finely chopped onion
6 large chopped potatoes
2 cans cream of chicken soup
1 can cream of celery soup
¾ package Velveeta cheese cubed
Fill stock pot up ⅔ to ¾ full, add bouillon, celery, potatoes, and onion. Bring water to a boil, then reduce heat cook about 40 minutes. Add 3 cans of soup and simmer 10 minutes. Add Velveeta until heated through.
*Notes: After the cooking process, I like to let the soup sit on the stove for a while covered with a lid, so the flavors can blend. This recipe typically tastes the best on the second day.
