Mom: So beautiful...

Three weeks later, and I still find myself checking the floor to make sure the tubing from her oxygen machine isn't being tread upon.

Three weeks later, and there are times when I could swear that I'm hearing her call my name.

Three weeks later, and there hasn't been a night yet that I haven't woken up at 3 in the morning to check on her.

Three weeks later and I still keep wanting to read the comic strips from the daily newspaper to her. Especially Dennis the Menace and The Family Circus. And Blondie of course...

Three weeks later and... I'm missing Mom more than ever.

It was three weeks ago this morning that she passed away. She had been in hospice care for not even a full day, when my aunt called to tell me that Mom's blood pressure was dropping and her breathing was bottoming out. I'm pretty sure the speedometer hit 100 on that frantic drive back to the hospice after my first real semblance of sleep in several days.

And then, less than an hour later, she was gone.

I'm still trying to understand my feelings about that. Dad and I, we each held a hand in her final moments. Her right hand was already cold to the touch, her pulse faint, but there. And then it became too weak to feel.

There was one final breath - the last of nearly a billion - and a long exhalation. Then, nothing more. Mom's lungs, which had been ravaged so by disease these past long several years, gave out at last. They had first drawn air on December 3rd, 1937.

Between that first breath and the last there were 74 years of life, of laughter, of sadness, of hardship, of sacrifice, of struggles and battles… but most of all, of love.

Mom and Dad, on their Wedding Day in 1970

Mom's death, it wasn't what I was expecting. Wasn't what I had prepared for, this moment that I'd known was coming for most of my life. I still remember being a small child when the realization came upon me that Mom and Dad, weren't going to be around forever. That there was going to come a time when that would be one of them, and then the other, that I would be staring down at inside a casket. It was a thought that had terrified me and made me cry so very, very hard. And now here was that moment...

In the end, Mom... just slipped away. The nurse said the time was 8:26 and I knew then that Mom had gone.

I was expecting, well... something more. I don't know what. I've seen and experienced things in my life that I still can't explain, have long ago stopped trying to understand. Things that in the end, you have to just take on faith and accept that they are as part of this world as anything we see with our own two eyes every day. And I guess that, I thought the death of a loved one would be one of those things.

But instead... nothing. Mom died. Peacefully.

And maybe there was something more that happened in that room, something that not I or Dad or Uncle Nub or Aunt Catherine or the hospice staff could witness. Kristen, my girlfriend, believes that there were angels there, waiting to receive Mom. I wouldn't doubt it. Some of the hospice people said that they had seen angels there during the years they've been working there. I don't have any reason to doubt that. I believe that an angel took Mom's mother – my beloved Granny – when she passed away in 2000. Mom had just stepped out of Granny's room to make a phone call when Granny died moments later. I can't believe she had been alone when she left us.

Think I'm talking foolishness? A week or so before she died, Dad said that he heard Mom having an animated conversation in the room where we had set up her hospital bed in our house. I wasn't there at the time so I don't know for sure what was going on, except that Mom was talking... seemingly to herself. Dad went in and asked Mom about who she was talking to. Her reply was "None of your business!"

Yeah, it would be so easy to ascribe that sort of thing to a lack of oxygen, or (as it turns out was the case for Mom) too much carbon dioxide building up. That's what she had a few weeks before her death, when she didn't know what she was doing and got out of bed and tried to walk and then fell and broke her hip. We had her taken to the hospital but, there was nothing more that could be done. We brought her home a few days later and wound up having one last week with her, which included our very last Christmas as a full family in our house.

Anita, Mom, Dad, and me at Granny's house in 1994

I don't think Mom was out of her mind when she was engaged in that conversation. In spite of momentary bouts of confusion toward the end, she maintained the sharpest mind that I've ever known. Whoever she was talking to, in those days when she told us quite often that she would be going Home soon, it was something meant for Mom, not for us.

I held Mom's hand and then she was gone and then the next day, the next time I saw her body, I couldn't feel the tears coming at all. As of this writing, they still haven't come. I keep wanting the tears to come. Instead, as I looked at what was left of my mother, the only thing that I could think of, was...

"She was so very beautiful."

And I had no idea how beautiful she had been, until I saw her in the casket. How beautiful she had always been. What we saw at the funeral home, what we laid to rest the next afternoon, that was only an empty vessel, the merest and meanest shadow of the soul and essence of Ruby Inez Roberts Knight. That was not "Mom" at all. Just... her earthly shell.

But even so, I haven't been able to stop thinking about how... she was just so very beautiful. That she had always been beautiful, in spite of the careworn years and that final decade which she had to endure.

Dad has told me that he believed she was holding on for me. I don't know about that. But he also told me that a few days before she died, that Mom told him "Don't worry about Chris, he’s going to be fine." That she had been waiting to know that, before she was ready to let go.

I don't want to disappoint her. I never want her to have been anything but proud of me. Anita, my sister... now she's the one that any parent would be proud of! I mean, she's got a house of her own. More important than that she has a real career: a physical therapist with a Ph.D. And all I've had to show for my time on this Earth so far is a divorce, a very strange and meandering "career" as a filmmaker and writer and newspaper reporter, a mental illness, an Eagle Scout badge, and a run for school board that started out as a joke and depending on who you are is still a joke.

Mom and Dad see me get Eagle Scout, 1992

Mom told me she was proud of that last one though. I know she was of that, at least. She came to the polls on Election Day in 2006, when I was standing outside the precinct. She went in and came out and told me how proud she was to have cast a vote for her son. So, I guess I got to make her proud in that much.

But then one friend, and then another, told me something too. That Mom was with us long enough to see me take back control of my life. That Mom was here long enough to come to know and love Kristen: a girl who I can't stop thanking God for His putting her into my life. That Mom, most of all, got to see me finally have the deep and abiding faith in God that I have been trying for most of my life to have and enjoy.

Maybe the reason I haven't totally broken down in tears from Mom's passing is because, her passing was... so perfectly timed. And I have to believe that God's hand was behind that.

I'm not going to make it a secret that I have been living with Mom and Dad for the past three years, after my first marriage collapsed. I have been here, helping Dad to take care of Mom. And I'm never going to regret that. I just don't believe in apologizing for one's acts of love. I may not have been where I've wanted to be during this time, but more than ever I do understand that I have been where I needed to be.

These past three years, Mom and I drew closer together than we had ever been able to be before. The years that I was growing up, they weren't easy for either of us. Only now do I understand that it was because of not only my own bipolar disorder but also because of very terrible strains that she was under. Either one of us would have had it hard. Put the two of us together under the same roof and that was a guaranteed recipe for anger and rancor. There were times... too many times unfortunately... that we each said things to the other that we came to regret.

But during the past three years that I was taking care of Mom, we had a lot of time to talk as we had never had the chance to do before. And when she died, I could let her go with a glad heart. Those three years, we left no stone unturned. Nothing left unsaid. She got to leave with nothing held back between the two of us.

I wish that there had been more time. We could have had years more together. I wanted Mom to see Kristen and I get married. Wanted Mom to see her first grandchild be born. Wanted to... well, I guess have some time that we didn't get to have before.

God's ways are not our ways however. And His timing is not something we can understand... but I do take comfort in knowing that His timing is always perfect. Always!

He let Mom come Home at exactly the right time, and not a moment too late or too soon. It was something that she had wanted more than anything. I can't understand that yet, but I can accept it.

Mom with our cocker spaniel Bridget, Christmas 1998

Now, comes moving on. Moving forward. Moving ahead with life. Because that is what Mom would want. That's what God needs from us. From me. This journey that Mom has completed, is now left to those of us who yet linger behind. Someday, I trust that God will let me come Home too, in His perfect timing. And I don't know when that will be...

...and neither is it left to me to wonder. Because it is the lot of each of us to occupy ourselves until He is ready for us.

But I can know that He has made me ready now, for this journey of life. Because He sent the best person I could possibly imagine to prepare me for it.

God sent Mom to teach me how to give everything nothing short of my very best effort.

God sent Mom to teach me how to always do what's right, no matter how unpopular it might be.

God sent Mom to teach me the loveliness of a generous nature.

God sent Mom to teach me to fight for what's right and to stand up for those who need it most.

God sent Mom to teach me how to laugh. Even to laugh at one's self.

God sent Mom to teach me how to serve others best by serving Him first.

And most of all, God sent Mom to teach me how to love.

Mom died three weeks ago today. But that's okay. We all die. Nobody gets out alive. Not even me. There's nothing wrong with that.

But Mom isn't gone. She's just waiting for us. She's over There even now. Waiting with Granny and her father, and with her three brothers and with Bridget and with Doc and with everyone else who has gone before...

And she is still so very beautiful.