My Mom lives in Roseville, California. My Dad died in September 2007, basically from prostate cancer, so Mom's been on her own since then. I truly expected her to take a while to recover from his death, and then move back to the Chicago area to be by my older brother Jim, her sisters and extended family.
But she didn't! She decided to stay in Sunny Northern California. She rebounded, got involved again in card clubs, extended her friend base and got back into her golf game. My sister Carol lives in San Francisco, nearly 3 hours to the west. My brother Steve lives in Reno, nearly 3 hours to the East. I live in Indianapolis, nearly 2000 miles East.
Sigh. It's impossible to just drop in for a cup of coffee, have supper together, or to help with spring cleaning. But I've gone west annually for years (really, it's not a hardship to HAVE to go to California!) and Mom has flown back to various Midwest cities for graduations and weddings.
But we are allll getting older. Every now and again, I'd urge Mom to consider moving home to Illinois like her Mother did. My Grannie and Gramps retired to Florida; after Gramps died, Grannie moved back to Illinois and lived the last 10 years of her life with family about her.
But the thought of moving (and back to snow at that) was overwhelming and she stayed. She'd call and say she was lonely for family, but ...Northern California IS really nice.
Well, finally it happened - early December 2011 my Mom was diagnosed with Uterine Cancer. Surgery found that the cancer had escaped from her uterus into the lymph nodes of her groin area. So what could have been a simple removal turned into a "oh oh" situation. So after a few weeks of recovery from the surgery, she was started on a chemotherapy program; six sessions of being hooked up to a chemo drip for 5 hours, 3 weeks apart.
She did the first 3 sessions. I flew out for session number number 4 on April 1. Instead of dropping her off for chemo, she was found to have low oxygen because of a smattering of blood clots in her lower lungs and so chemo was cancelled for a month. She is now on oxygen 24 hours a day and cumadin, scared and wishing she had local family. :)
My sister has been so excellent, driving over every weekend from San Francisco to visit. But she works a long week and she simply can't keep that up. Mom is scheduled to start her chemo up again May 1. Three more sessions; 18 more weeks. And after? a month of daily radiation. Hopefully that will be that..and she'll have another 10-15 years of golf and gardening. Where will that be tho? As the doctor kept saying "you ARE 77." Decisions decisions. I want HER to make those decisions for herself.
And of course, in thinking about Mom, I think about myself. I have three boys, living in 3 different cities. One 2000 miles away in Idaho, the other two still in Indiana, but over an hour drive away. When I broke my elbow last February, luckily I had my friend Scott to help me. As I get older, I know I want to be by my boys...I'll have to decide just who to live by because I don't think they'll ever all live in the same city again.
