Mary Ellen Flick, Nov 13, 1914- Oct 23, 1967.

My mother died ten days after my tenth birthday. She had a brain tumor that they tried to remove when I was six with limited success. It left her aphasic and changed. We learned to read together – me for the first time, her for the second. She spent four hard years fighting her way back to almost normal only to have the tumor come back and finally kill her.

Over the years, I’ve always wondered what sort of relationship we would have had if she had lived. Would we have respected each other? Would she have called all the time to see how I was? Would she have approved of the person I turned out to be? Would we be Facebook friends (okay, unlikely given that if she were alive today she’d be almost 98, but still…)?  The list is pretty endless because the list of things I didn’t get to share with her is very long: all my various graduations, jobs, romances, marriage, a lifetime of failure and successes, failure and joy. A thousand little moments in life that we could have shared.

My memories of her are a combination of snapshots that as the years have passed have become less and less clear to me. Are they my memories or are they the memories that other family members have shared with me? I don’t know the difference anymore.

Here are things I know:

• I have her big feet and her big hands
• I still have the last tooth fairy note she ever wrote me
• She was younger than I am now when she died
• This list should be longer

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! I miss you a lot.