REFLECTIONS OF A DAY

I have a fairly good memory about dates--historical dates I am okay with but mostly I can remember the dates connected with significant events in my life.  And even that isn't total correct--I do well with figuring out years and the day of the week something happened; sometimes I don't know the actual date unless I look it up.  As a result, much of the year I have floating memories of events in my family's life, significant times in my work as an birth parent and adoption worker, adoption placements I have attended, vacations, etc.  We all do that to more or lesser degree.  For example the first two weeks of February are forever connected with the first two weeks we spent as Ben's parents--driving him as a four month old infant back and forth from the orphanage where he had to stay at night to our house where he spent his days (It was Chinese New Year time and no paperwork was going to be done to release him from the orphanage during that two week time.) 

This is a long introduction to arrive at the topic of this post.  FEBRUARY 5th--it is probably just an ordinary day for you, unless you are my dad or my siblings or you happen to have a birthday on that day.  For me, on February 5th, 1995, early on a Sunday morning, my mother passed away in a hospital in Amarillo, Texas.  Although it has been 25 years, it seems like yesterday in many ways and an eternity on other days.  Losing your mother is a life changing event, despite the "common" nature of the loss--most of us will see our mothers leave this world before we do.  It is the order of life and part of the eternal plan.  Nevertheless, it changes us as humans and makes us (if we allow it) to grief with and comfort others in a better way. However it also leaves us with a certain awareness of loss and a place that is not quite ever filled on this earth. 

My mom (Eileen Jane Owen Giberson) was amazing!! She was in every way just a good person. She loved our dad and she loved us and sacrificed for us in ways that I can not even begin to approach.  She was talented.  She could sing and play the piano and the organ.  She loved drama and often she and dad were involved in roadshows or drama productions at Church. She was a writer--of poems, stories and kept a journal over her adult life which is incredible. I never remember her ever saying something bad about someone.  I am the oldest of my family--four brothers and three sisters--and I don't remember her yelling at us.  She was a happy woman and she cared about the gospel and all of the people around her.  Some day I hope to grow up and be a bit more like her.

In 1980 and 1981, my mother's health began to decline.  This was frustrating to her, she wrote in her journal, because she had begun an effort to be more physically active and to eat more healthy ("now the kids were in school all day.").  Instead, her energy declined and she was frequently sick with pneumonia and other lung inflections--and a cough that wouldn't go away.  After a family vacation to Oregon to visit her sister and other relatives in the area, she was hospitalized which ultimately led to a diagnosis of congestive heart failure--at 47 years old.  I think I cried more that night than almost any other time during the ups and downs of her health.  I couldn't imagine that my mom wouldn't be there as part of my own mothering journey which hadn't even started yet.

Her health declined and eventually she was more and more restricted to the house.  No longer could she lead music or play the piano because of the stress on her heart.  Her visiting teaching became confine to letters and phone calls.  For a while, she was called to visit teach "people in the hospital."  Amarillo was a large city in the panhandle of Texas and often members of the Church would come for treatment from outlying areas.  She would call the hospitals on a regular basis to see if anyone had checked in and marked "LDS" on their medical records.  She would talk to them, send cards, and alert the leadership of the ward as needed.  You could give my mom that type of assignment because she was a faithful, friendly person. She often said that there was a benefit to being home all of the time, because it was a busy time as a mother of eight children with kids coming and going.  The fact that she was there meant she was available for conversations at times she might not have otherwise been around.  That was my mother--she found the good in every thing.

Then one night around Thanksgiving in 1984, my parents called with a request to pray about whether mom should seek a heart transplant.  Without one, she didn't have much more time to live.  Mom said later that she thinks that it was easy for us kids to say yes, because we grew up in the age of such things, but her biggest fear was not the surgery, but the fact that she felt at peace and ready to die at that point and "she might mess up if she had extra years to live."

In June of 1985, she had a heart transplant at Stanford Medical Center and lived another 9 1/5 years in great health.  And "she didn't mess up," she got to see several grandchildren born, served in the Church, and lived life in a full and abundant manner.  She even was able to make a trip to visit us when we lived in Hong Kong.

Oh, how I love her (and my dad.)  One example of the type of person that she is occurred about 6 months after her heart transplant.  I was attending Church with her and happened to be there when she bore her testimony in Relief Society (that used to be a pattern on the first Sunday of the month).  She started her testimony--"I don't know why I am so blessed and have been protected from the trials of life......"  I didn't think anything about it until the next sister started her testimony "If Sis. Giberson who just spent six months away from her family to have a heart transplant says she hasn't had any trials, then we all need to learn to be more grateful like she is."  My mom was grateful and she passed that to me.  She would have dad stop the car on the side of the road so we could look at the black-eyed Susans (flowers) on the side of the road.  She pointed out rainbows and clouds to us all of the time.  She loved the earth, but most of all, she loved the Lord and His Church.

My parents in their reunion shirts from our last reunion
with our mom--in Plano, Texas in 1994.

It was fitting that my mom passed away early on a Sunday morning.  No day represented her better than Sunday.

So it might be only February 5th on your calendar, but on mine, it is so much more.

Til we meet again, mom.