One Year

   It's been a long year, this 2020.

While I know this is bringing to mind a "No Kidding" and perhaps adding an expletive or two as well for those reading, but one year ago tonight, my family lost my mother.

Everyone loses people close to them in life and those people can be so important, but no matter your relationship with them, you only have one mother and one father.

Considering the loss was my first of a parent, it's all new to me and like many things in life, your age doesn't matter when something hits that has never happened to you before.

Experience, after all, comes after doing something for a time or two.

And this experience, which almost everyone will face sooner or later, is such that you don't want to get used to it.

I'm almost grateful in a way that mom didn't see the havoc wrought by Covid-19 because she would have been concerned every day with worry about her family. Children, grandchildren, her mother, her husband, and yes-herself.

Mom was always someone that felt pain differently than most. She was quite the hypochondriac and what I always felt was looking for medicine and doctors to make her "right".

She never found that peace and I've believed that the parade of surgeries and various "fixes" added up contributed to her final years of poor health.

Dealing with Mom's death hasn't been easy and when I look back at some things, there are regrets.

However, when I look back at other times, I see things that caused issues that I feel very good about my decisions concerning those matters.

Sometimes we think about what if's in life and sometimes it's fun to think about.

Other times, they can drag us down and hold us back to the point of immobility.

I miss my mother and what she brought to my life.

There were times that she could be overbearing and there were times she could be extremely caring.

She'd do anything for you on one hand, and then ask you to do something that you would hate in return.

It wasn't always pleasant, but it was never dull!

I miss her a lot and sometimes, something small will remind me of her and I'll usually laugh to myself.

It's funny that I have found more memories to make me laugh and smile than those that make me sad.

The Christmas season has changed permanently for me from this point forward.

It'll always have the "time of the season", but it's also going to be a time to stop and remember my mom.

2020 has been a year to forget between the Covid-19 pandemic and almost every part of American life being affected by the handling of this crisis.

Add that to the political insanity that has followed with one side of the fence battling the other and too many other things to mention and you have a year to forget.

That means, of course, that historically 2020 will be a year that will be recalled by many and especially by those that either wasn't old enough to truly experience it or weren't around for it at all.

And it's the year that I learned that to appreciate things a bit more and to try to put things from the past in the past.