Mother, should I run for president.

Yesterday was my mother's birthday. She would have been 74 -- she died a few years ago, very quickly (like less than a month and a half) after her diagnosis. By the time they saw it, the cancer had spread from her lungs to her bones and to her brain. (She went to the hospital with a back-ache -- it was the cancer in her bones.) Oddly, she had had pneumonia about a year earlier, and nothing showed up on any of the gazillion lung x-rays.

I was thinking about her last night when I couldn't get to sleep (cause or effect?). I still get mad thinking about some of the things she did/failed to do. For example, I still wish that she hadn't moved from The Ancestral Homeland when my father died, but I understand why she made that decision.

She had a great relationship with my daughter. And with my wife -- although they are two *very* different people. She lived with my grandmother for most of the time after my grandfather died -- and took care of her for a long time after my grandmother's mind started to go.

And she opened her home to those in need -- her pregnant 17 year old niece, her alcoholic nephew, countless friends who were in between jobs or homes or spouses.

Life was not terribly fair to her. Her husband died when she was the age I am now, leaving her with 5 kids. 5 bratty kids (well, at least one bratty kid). She survived breast cancer in her fifties. She watched her mother slowly descend into Alzheimer's, taking care of her at home until the last possible moment -- and then, one month after the trauma of putting her mother into a home, in a nice little "fuck you" from the universe, she was hit with her final cancer diagnosis.

Despite this, she dealt. She never whined, and she at least had her family around her when she passed away at home under Hospice care.

And, since I am half watching Olberman and Russert, I should note that she was born a New Deal Democrat into a machine family, and stuck with the donkey through thick and thin. She wasn't a huge fan of Hillary's, so she probably would be pleased that Obama has (apparently) won the nomination.

Anyway, happy belated birthday, Mom.