A handful of my favorite pictures of Mom.

Happy Mother's Day Mom, I miss you so much.

I couldn't find anything appropriate for today. So I am just including my eulogy from Mom's funeral.

Several years ago Mom got sick and was hospitalized for dehydration. It was the holidays and I couldn’t come up here right away and she said not to change my plans and come the next weekend like we had planned. During her stay in the hospital I was out grocery shopping at Winn Dixie and I totally broke down on their potato chip aisle. Mom’s mortality came crashing down on me amidst the cheese curls and Doritos. If anything ever happened to her how could I ever shop again at Winn Dixie, or how could I buy saltine crackers or pop tarts without being reminded of her.

So when Mom became ill and we decided to come back home to help take care of her, I spent my time away from her thinking how will I….how will I take care of her when I am the most squeamish person in the family, how will I go to Carson’s to help pre-arrange her funeral, how will I be able to take my next breath once she passes away, how will I support my family, how can I go to her funeral, how will I be able to bury her, and how will I be able to walk away from her once this service is over. But I am finding that I have her strength and I am doing all the things that I never thought I had the power to do. One breath at a time, one small step here and there and so it will go for the second half of my life – the part I live without her. So, I decided to embrace all the things that remind me of her, to hold them close to me, to cherish them and not hide from them any more.

So I came up with a very incomplete list of All Things Mom. And while discussing what I would say here today with my family they all shared and added to this list – but I decided to just go with the ones that had meaning to me – my original list. But all of us have this list inside of us – it is specific to each one of us. Some things on the list you will understand right away and others you won’t understand until you ask, some you may never understand. And as we move forward we will share our lists, compare, remember, smile and laugh at what I like to call:

All Things Mom

Watermelon
Chili
Pool
Bowling
Rubbing your butt for luck
Elephants
Flea markets
Thrift stores
All the railroads in Monopoly
Onions or lack thereof
Burnt steaks
Saltine crackers and toaster pastries
Patsy Cline
And much to my chagrin, Rush Limbaugh
3 fingers of Milk
Coca Cola
Smiley faces
Confetti paper
Pillowcases and pantyhose
Separate
John Henry’s hammer
So help me Hannah
Wait til your father gets home
Canasta
Uno
And cards in general
Divinity Candy
Cake decorating
Yellow roses
Star Trek
Star Gate
Perry Mason
Quincy
Murder, She wrote
Vincent Price
Cooking shows, again no onions please
Ham balls and white gravy – where I didn’t hold the onions
And I never heard the end of it
Name him Paul
Wally world
Winn Dixie
And finally, don’t you dare cut his hair!

~your daughter