Where's the Peanut Butter?

As I got off the bus near the Space Needle – I noticed I missed a call from my dad and noticed it was from his cell phone.  This is weird – it’s never been entirely clear that my dad is able to turn the phone on (the last time it showed a sign of life, I realized my sister was visiting and sending text messages from it).  I called back and greeted my dad:

“Hi – I missed your call this morning?”

“Oh – Patrick – you got my voicemail?”

“No – I just called right back…”

I didn’t make it to Iowa City this past December for Christmas.  Tickets started at about $800 and seemed to just keep going up – but I found a much more affordable fare after the holidays and I spent a cold January weekend in Iowa. I’d talked with my grandmother around Christmas and she was, as always, a delight to talk with, but I could tell she wasn’t feeling well.  She’d been up and down with some sickness and injuries during the year and I remember her telling me on one call “You know, Patrick, I’ve lived a good life.”  It’s really hard to hear someone say this.  It’s not really made easier when you know it’s true, but I suppose it might help.

When I visited in January the latest news was pretty promising.  I’m really a rube when it comes to human health, but it seemed her symptoms might be a sign of pneumonia-of-some-type or maybe-some-cancer and it looked like Marian might be feeling symptoms from the pneumonia (which had a less-bad prognosis).  A few hours and one call later, it was pretty clear it was the cancer.

I visited as much as I could over the weekend but it was pretty clear that entertaining company – though she was, again, as always, great company – wasn’t really easy on Marian. We had a nice dinner at Blackstone.  I came nattily dressed in LL Bean’s finest addition to their catalog for winter 2012, but the weekend really came and went quickly.  In the 6 weeks since then, the news has been pretty clear and pointing in the same direction: her health was getting worse and pain increasing.

So it shouldn’t have come as any real surprise as I stopped while taking with my dad under the shade of a tree near Seattle Center where the homeless seek refuge from the rain.

“Marian died this morning.”

But of course it was a surprise, and awful, and I stood there sobbing in the rain and not knowing what else to do.

My dad put my mom on, who had been spending a lot of time with her mother these past months. My mom told me how Marian was still getting around and doing all sorts of things that I know would have made me think “You really shouldn’t be doing that…”  And I could only think that yes, she did live a good life.  I know she knew she was loved and she made her love known to the people that were important to her.

There are a lot of ways we measure our successes and failures in life, but really that’s about all that it comes down to, isn’t it?