Saying Goodbye to My Mother

 I just said goodbye to my Mother, who is 1800 miles away, unresponsive and no longer eating or drinking. The hospice staff said that unresponsive people can still hear and understand, so my sister-in-law held the phone to her ear while I said my last words to her. Mother is 99 and this turn of events isn't unexpected, but I am still hurting. I saw her in May and she was in good shape. Michael and I had a lovely time with her. I have no unresolved issues with my Mother, no conflicts or remnants of past problems to cloud our relationship. For that I am thankful.

She started her decline over the summer, getting fuzzier about events and information, eating less and less. She held up her end of a telephone conversation fine as recently as two weeks ago, although she would sometimes respond to a question with "Now that's hard to know." She lost interest in food last winter. She has weighed about 145 pounds for a long time (a nice weight for her), but when we saw her in May she was down to 125 pounds, and now she only weighs 80. She will probably be gone in the next 24 hours. 

I made plane and hotel reservations to visit her in Helena in mid-November. I'll be cancelling them, of course, but I can't bring myself to do it until Mother is actually dead. My brother who is in charge of the details of her passing asked me to write her obituary a few months ago. I did, but it was hard. After she passes, I'll post her obit. She was a remarkable women and I'd like everyone to know it.

Mother wanted to live to be 100 and I wish she had. She came damn close. If there is a Heaven, she'll be in it soon, hopefully with my Dad by her side. 

Here's a first: I'm blogging in the Veterinary ER at 12:40 am. Smudge, our 11-year old tuxedo cat, is sick. I feel extra bad because he had been sneezing last night and this morning but I didn't pay attention. Then I didn't hear him all day, so I thought he was better. Well, at bedtime tonight, I found him curled up in a hot, miserable heap by my pillow. His mouth was hanging open, his tongue was sticking out, and he was very hot. Obviously a sick boy.

Thankfully, they built a Veterinary ER near us. I hope we aren't here all night because we have an early appointment tomorrow.

This is the first time I've blogged using my cell phone. It's the first time I've blogged in a long time. Maybe using my cell is the trick that's going to get me blogging again.

Creativity Explosion

I feel like I am in the middle of a creativity explosion these days. Quilting is big part of my creative output and I have become more and more interested in making art quilts. Bed quilts and lap quilts are large and take more time than I want to give sometimes. If I am not driven by a deadline - like a birthday or Christmas - I get lazy about working on projects that I have started. Moonglow is a good example. It is a beautiful quilt that I made in a block of the month class; it was paper pieced and I couldn’t have done that on my own without the class. But it is huge and I am hand-quilting it; I feel overwhelmed by it and haven’t done a lot of work on it. I told Alix she could have it, but I don’t have a deadline to give it to her, so no pressure. Plus, I kind of don’t want to give it away, at least not yet.

I have made several small projects in the last year that I like very much. A thread-painted small quilt with a rural scene on it that I lavishly hand-quilted while Michael had chemotherapy is one. Another is a miniature quilt I made for a Guild challenge and just finished. Simple, but lovely colors. I have a quilt in process for baby Gabriel and a UFO quilt of Felix’s footprints during her first year of life. Admittedly, there are a few more UFOs in my sewing stuff, mostly from classes. I want to get them finished, but I don’t know when that will happen.

This year I added another creative outlet: ceramics. Michael and I have wanted to do ceramics for several years but never got around to it until 2017. Last March we took a four-week class at The Potter’s Wheel and both made several pretty bowls. I even made a pitcher to add to my collection! This fall, we decided to enrol at Lone Star College for a semester-long ceramics class. It is very intense, lots of class time plus needed studio time after classes. The teacher, Kelley Eggert, is great and has really taught us a lot in a short time. I have made things I would never have expected to make. When they are all finished, at the end of the semester, I’ll take pictures of them and post the pix here for review.

I retain my interest in photography, although I’m not too active right now. I did put a photograph in a show at the JCC this summer and sold it. Last year year I sold an art quilt out of a WiVLA exhibition. Selling things is nice. We have a slush fund/windfall account and extra money like that, refunds, Christmas money, etc go into it. We paid our tuition for the ceramics class out of the slush fund.

I plan to take the ceramics 2 course in the spring. I really like ceramics and I am better at it than I knew I would be. It adds to my repertoire of creative outlets. I like it.

(And lest I forget, I found a new writers group and I am getting back into my book. I am developing some ambitions about finishing it this winter. We’ll see.)