(Part 1 of My Fifth Year)
I am 5 x 10 (oh, how I wish that was 5′ 10″) but this year, 2017, in many ways I am experiencing my fifth year. Today s that first fifth marker as it is the fifth Easter I will not spend a four-day weekend at the beach with my mom. Easter 2012 was our last trip to our beloved New Jersey shore town, and several weeks after we returned home, she began her sudden and swift decline as a result of Stage 4 gallbladder cancer. By the end of June, she was gone.
I work hard to remember the good times instead of those two terrible months at the end which I am sad to report are the most prevalent when I open up my head and my heart to her memory. Sometimes it’s too painful to think about her at all but that is not fair to her or me. So I make a conscious effort to not bury her in the sandy recesses of my soul. That is a work in progress.
Today I will remember our annual first trip to the beach on Good Friday after a long winter. Windows down, regardless of the temperature, as we drove across the causeway connecting the mainland to the island. Reliving it as I write this knocks the wind out of me. I am tempted to push it down, push it away. But it was a privilege to be her daughter, her beach buddy, her best friend. And so I will honor her today and all the Easters we spent at the beach. Mom isn’t coming back on Sunday, but she is always with me. And that shore is a miracle to me.
