I keep remembering unusual things: the way she loved daffodils, jokes she told at the dinner table, the look in her eyes when she talked about my future. I knew about college before I'd never heard of high school; I was Mom's second chance at the degree she never had.
Her parents pushed her too much, too hard, and she always wished she hadn't let the pressure defeat her. She dropped out of college after one term for marriage and a secretarial job. While she never regretted marrying my father, she always regretted giving up her dream of becoming an accountant. She was determined her eldest daughter would never miss an opportunity.
One of the most extremely special times of my life was Christmas in my second school year, when I played Tiny Tim in a local community theater production of "A Christmas Carol." Mom delighted in my endless rehearsal (排练) stories and spent hours helping me work out ways of disguising my long hair. There's a line in the show: "And it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive had the knowledge." Change the pronouns and that sentence describes Mom perfectly.
She was the one person I could talk to about anything. She was right about so much, so often—much more than I gave her credit for at the time.
I never imagined she wouldn't be here now. I never thought cancer could strike so quickly, could kill someone so strong and determined in only a year. She's the only person I couldn't imagine living without; now, since last January, I've had to. Suddenly, I have no one to talk to about meaningless little things, no one whose advice I trust completely to help me with decisions. When I come home from school, I come home to an empty house, troubled by memories of the year she spent here dying. I remember the disastrous Thanksgiving when she was feeling terrible, and our wonderful last Christmas Eve together.
What I feel cheated of is the future we'll never have.
