Until Now

My mother's eyes had cleared into a penetrating blue. "Thank you," she had softly whispered. "This is not going to be as hard as I imagined it would be. I' m just sorry I won't be here to meet your boyfriend when he comes home from the war. But I can rest in peace knowing you will have someone here to care for you when you get to be my age."

A slight smile had spread itself like melted butter across my mother's lips when she took one last look at my face and said I would look younger with less makeup. Eventually, I cut back, saved money, silently thanked my mother. Truth be known, I'm not even positive when it was that my mother's hand had slipped away from my birthmark, or when the exact moment happened for her moved on to the other side of forever. Perhaps it is because, after all these years, I can still feel her touch.

Very recently, I dreamt of my own soul meeting up with hers'. Inside this state of being without a flaw or defect, our spirits floated together like two down feathers being blown away with a single goodbye kiss from the wind.

A well-worn patchwork quilt made up of selected pieces would best describe me now.

You see, I've spent one hundred years worth of collecting scraps of my life, piecing them together, arranging and rearranging the designs before binding them. And now that my life has gone full-circle with my mind still intact, I give thanks for having been blessed with a queen-sized coverlet of memories. Okay, so I'll take a moment to concede: I was wrong in believing that the pieces of life I had selected for my quilt were simply simple ones. Quite the opposite.

My mother's circumstance had presented me with enough courage to tell her that she had my permission to let go. I had always promised I would help her cross-over, and I did. Was it simple? No! Complex? A little. Selfless? Absolutely. In fact, the most selfless thing I had ever done, or would ever do again. Until now.

If my messages are coming through to you, then you know I have never been afraid of dying or, for that matter, helping another. Allow me to admit that I have always been mindful about the possibility of being at the mercy of someone else, or having to endure horrific pain. For me, quality of life and living it with dignity must be given top priority.

It has always been my opinion that anything resembling fears and worries are mindless misgivings related to outdated rites of passage. Dysfunctional cousins of those damn hand- me-downs. Remember? To put it in other words, as the young would say, "Hand-me-downs suck!"

Now that I am to be the last member of my family going through the process of exiting from this earth-plane, I want to make sure that any defensive shells I may have pulled around my life are relinquished. And the next time I travel through life, I plan on waking up every morning and focusing for a few moments, on the memories I've stashed away from the day before .

Although, it seems to me that someone once told me (can't recall who it was), if I want to make God laugh, tell her my plans and to be very careful of what I wish for, because everything is a tradeoff. Oh, and speaking of tradeoffs, I find myself in the uncomfortable position exchanging my life for my death. I'm not at all sure of how this happened, or what to do next.