Thursday's throes of the past

Headstone.

Can it really be two years since you were sitting in your chair smoking one cigarette after another and drinking can after can of coke?

Just before Christmas, you threw away your pills and said you never felt better.

We thought you used that oxygen machine to make us go away and stop troubling you with our drama.

We thought you could fix anything, you were our mother, you were so strong.

You lived 20 years before you married, 33 years with our father and nearly 22 years after he was gone.

No one meant for life to be so hard. But we did laugh. As much as we cried, we did laugh, and that is what we will have to remember.

The lines of the song, “It’s the laughter, we will remember, whenever we remember, the way we were.”

I promise, we will work to remember the laugher, the fun we had, the puzzles, the roast beef, the mashed potatoes, the catering, even the wheat fields and the combine, the summers of 500 chickens, the babies, the smoke kisses, the reposting sales, the school reunions, the stolen days at the swimming pool,  the new born calves in the feedlot pasture, the evenings on the deck eating seeds and drinking coffee, and you yelling at the cat out the side door, and screaming over the phone about the mouse she brought in the house still alive,

and then there you were asleep in your bed for the last time.

You left us as unplanned as you came. Everyone loved you then, and we still do today.

Hope you like the headstone.

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