Mother Dearest,

[Crankin]

After reading some of these comments, I greatly appreciate my mom. Not that I didn't before, but as my brother and I have discussed, we had "good (normal) parents."

[salsabike]

I always appreciated mine too, so did my siblings. She died when I was 26, and had cancer off and on with aggressive treatment since I was 10. She's been gone over 19 years, now.

Oh, Sheila. I'm sorry. That's pretty tough.

[Crankin]

That is a nice tribute, Murienn. My mom died 2 days after I turned 43. She was only 67, and everyone in her family lives until their 90s. She found out she had an autoimmune liver disease when she was about 55. She got so sick, eventually, that she had a liver transplant, and at one point before that, even spent 2 months in the hospital, to make her condition look "worse" than it was, to get a transplant. That didn't work. About 6 months later, she had the transplant, but she never regained her health, all kinds of rejection issues, and heart issues, resulting from heavy duty meds. Thankful that my kids spent a lot of time with her as young children. One of her last words of advice was that DH and I needed to develop a common interest; our kids were in 6th and 8th grade when she died, and about 3 years later, DS started riding. We found our common interest!
I will feel better when I live past age 67.

[emily_in_nc]

I am very, very fortunate as I have a wonderful mother. She's 80 now (81 on Nov. 2) and still doing very well both physically (for her age) and mentally. She cooks like crazy for us when we visit, and we share a lot of laughs and discussions, though we are very different in some ways since she's never been athletic and doesn't get the cycling, running, etc. I do AT ALL. But we do both love books and good food and birds and gardening, and HGTV. Sure, she drives me crazy at times: she can be a bit controlling, a worrywort, etc. But I love her dearly, and I just don't know what I'm going to do without her when she's gone as she is my best friend in so many ways.