The is a colored version of the lineart that
Yamer did for me over at her
Fiverr page.
Ever
since I knew that my mother didn’t have very long, I wanted a tribute
done to her memory. At least a few of them. I have several others that I
have in mind and perhaps I can add this to it and make one large one.
But for this picture, I had sent pictures of my mother along with
pictures of the garden that she loved and tended every year once the
snow melted. Even though she hated the snow. She wished that it would be
spring and summer all year round so that she could be outside and tend
to the flowers.
Originally, in the picture that Yamer did, there
was no wine glass, so I wanted to add that because it was one of the
many pleasures that she had: chardonnay towards the end of the day.
Some
of you may already know the tribute that I had posted over in my
journal, but I wish to paste it here and add a few more things to it.
On July 1st, 2013, my mother had passed away from pneumonia brought on by cirrhosis of the liver. She was 68 years old.
There
isn’t much more I can say about this. To try to capture the wonder of
this woman in a simple journal entry would be like trying to see the
Louvre through an pinhole. There would be no justice to be done to all
that this wonderful woman has done, not just for my brothers and I, but
for the dozens of others whose lives she had touched through her
dedication as a nurse, her compassion to those in pain and in need, her
tenacity and unwillingness to give up and sheer love that had spilled
from her heart and flowed into others.
But, she always tried to
teach us that we shouldn’t be too sad when someone passes away. We
should celebrate life in the face of death.
Just as Prince Sirik
Metak once wrote, “If I shall die here on the spot and in the country
that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must one day
die.”
And so, I will try to remember the things that she loved:
Her garden
Irish Breakfast Tea
Chardonnay Wine
Ricky Gervais (British Comedian)
Robin Williams (comedian)
Anthony Hopkins (British Actor)
Chopped (Food Network Program)
Diners, drive-ins and dives (food network program)
Knitting
Counting Cross-stitch
1000 piece puzzles
Her red Charter Club Throw Blanket
Sushi and Wasabi (She always said, if it doesn’t make your nose run and your eyes water, it’s not spicy enough)
Fish, when it’s cooked properly
M*A*S*H (both the movie and TV series)
Alice in Wonderland (The Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party)
Shakespeare (Macbeth - “Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble!”)
The color blue
Cats (just one at a time because if there were too many, her allergies would act up)
Orange Sticks (the candy)
Lamb (The meat. Especially Leg of Lamb with Mint Sauce)
Beef, but nothing between bread and it must be rare. Very rare.
Alton Brown (I bid you good eating)
Bath and Body Works.
Ellen Degeneress (Comedian and TV show host)
Cashews
And so, I wish to end this with a few lines from an old Vera Lynn song:
“We’ll meet again
Don’t know where
Don’t know when
But I know we’ll meet again, some sunny day
Keep smiling through, just like you always do
Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away
So will you please say ‘hello’ to the folks that I know
Tell them I won’t be long
They’ll be happy to know
That when you saw me go,
I was singing this song
We’ll meet again
Don’t know where
Don’t know when
But I know we’ll meet again, some sunny day”
