A tribute to my Mom, who passed away May 6.

This will be my first Mother’s Day without Mom.

After two months of being ill, she’d had all she could handle a week ago today. Everything just caught up with her.

This is one of life’s milestones all of us know comes eventually, although we hope it might pass us by. Unfortunately, it never does, and no matter how much we brace ourselves, it still hits hard.
With this week leading up to Mother’s Day, all the ads and commercials promoting it don’t make things any easier.

Mom always was there for me, whether it was a cut foot or the measles or needing a clean pair of jeans. We spent a lot of time together while Dad worked the night shift as I was growing up. Usually on Friday nights we stayed up and waited for Dad to come home. We’d watch the late show on TV and eat snacks.

We watched almost anything, except scary movies. Mom didn’t like many of those, especially any with the Wolfman. Her favorites were Westerns, rootin’, tootin’ shoot ‘em ups, especially ones with John Wayne.
It was Mom who made me a movie fan.

One of her favorites was “Home from the Hill” with Robert Mitchum, Eleanor Parker and rising stars George Peppard and George Hamilton. She liked it because it was set in her hometown, Clarksville, Texas. It was from a novel of the same name by William Humphrey, who’d grown up at Clarksville.

She’d read the book, too. In fact, Mom was the reader of the family and helped inspire me to read. She liked some of Erskine Caldwell’s “earthy” novels. For their time, they actually were pretty racy stuff.

There are so many memories of Mom. You can look at me and realize she was a good cook. No one ever went hungry at her table. About the fanciest she got was making chocolate cakes, my favorite. No birthday was complete without one of Mom’s chocolate cakes.

She loved fresh vegetables, especially in the summer when there were tomatoes, onion, cucumbers, beans, greens and more from Dad’s garden. Sometimes whole meals had been on the vine just minutes before serving.
No one cooked French fries like Mom. She didn’t do anything special with the potatoes, but they were unique. I’ve never had any anywhere else that tasted like hers. They went best paired with her hamburger steak and cooked onions.

Onions were a staple for Mom, even until she went into the hospital in March. She always had to have a little onion with her meals. And bread-and-butter pickles, too.

Mom like to get out, at least until she had congestive heart failure a few years ago and had to use oxygen full time. After that, she spent most of her time at home. But before then, she always was ready to go for a ride or to take a trip. When I was little, she and Dad traveled a lot with Uncle Lee and Aunt Mamie. It cost less to carry our own food, or to pick up a few things at a grocery store along the way. On one trip, we’d stopped at a roadside park to fix breakfast. Dad, Uncle Lee and I went walking by a creek while Mom and Aunt Mamie worked on breakfast. I was wearing brand-new fatigues, the predecessors of Army surplus camo clothing, and somehow I slipped and fell into the bone-chilling water. I was upset more at getting my new fatigues wet than nearly being hypothermic.

For the rest of her life, Mom would laugh when she told that story.

She liked to laugh, Watching her nieces and nephews, and later her grandchildren, play made her laugh. Few things tickled her as much as watching her cats play, too. At one time, while living in the country, she was feeding about 30 cats that roamed around the place. She knew them all by name.

Mom always was generous, wanting to make sure her family had what they needed or wanted. There was hardly a time when I visited her that she didn’t ask if I needed anything, if Kim needed something, if the kids needed anything. Every time I left her, she’d tell me to give her kids a hug and tell them she loved them, even when she could barely speak these last few weeks.

Mothers are like that. So are grandmothers. Everyone has special memories of their own mothers, of the times they had together, of all they shared. Mothers also sacrifice a lot to make sure their loved ones don’t go wanting for anything. Mothers will go without before letting their families go without. Mothers are last in line when it’s time for new clothes, the last ones to fix their plates at the dinner table, the last ones to bed at night after a long day of taking care of their families.

Yet for all that, they’re first in the hearts of their loved ones. All to often we don’t appreciate all our mothers do, we don’t tell them thank you, we don’t say the words “I love you,” although they know we do through that sixth sense mothers have.
Take time this weekend to put those feelings in love. Go see your mother. Call her if she doesn’t live close. Tell your mother you love her, and that you appreciate all she’s done for you. Clichéd as it sounds, remember, none of us would be here if not for our mothers.

And Mom, I love you. Always.