I grew up in a house built on an acre of farmland given to my dad, Jim, by his parents, Martin and Donna Hagen, 22 miles north of Bismarck. My other grandparents, Joe and Ruth Stumpf, lived in Bismarck, and we would go to visit them on weekends.
Most Saturdays ended with that half-hour drive home, in the dark, with me staring out the window at a giant sky of stars. And feeling like maybe I was in the wrong place.
Existentialism is a big topic at any age, but not as big as the universe looks from Highway 83. And I felt like there was someplace else, sometime else, someone else I was supposed to be.
The thing that always brought me back from these panicked thoughts was to peer over to the front passenger seat, and to see my mom, Sandy. She was my celestial guide, my terrestrial anchor that kept me tethered. I knew then and now that I was meant to be who I am, when I am, wherever I was.
I’m 42 now, so it’s been almost four decades since I needed those reminders. But I still use them today. An encouraging word from Mom was what propelled me on to do most things. I caught the bus to school each morning after she yelled at me to “Get up!” I went to college at my mom’s urging. When I bought my first house, my mom pushed me into action.
I showed Mom a profile picture on MySpace of a girl I’d met recently, and asked her if I should ask her out. When I asked that girl, my Sweetest Annette, to marry me, it was only after I’d told my equally sweet mom that I was going to do it.
Fifteen years ago, I wrote a personal column for the Bismarck Tribune. The greatest reward from that time was the weekly call I got from Mom. “I loved your column.”
When my grandparents died in succession, during the years in which I was still writing my column, I eulogized them in that space. “You made me cry today,” Mom said after she read my column about Grandma Donna. “Are you writing about your Grandma Ruth?” she asked after she passed. “I’d really like if you’d write something about your Grandpa Joe.”
So, I did. And I made her cry after all three.
Now, it’s ten years since I left my position at the Tribune, and that same amount of time since Mom was first diagnosed with cancer. She defeated Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma soundly then, because she had three new granddaughters she wanted to see grow up. And no doctor was going to tell her she couldn’t.
Once the cancer was safely in remission, she welcomed another granddaughter and two grandsons.
Tonight, I’m looking up into the night sky from a different place. I’m lying on a couch in a palliative care room at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Mom’s cancer came back this past summer. She was hospitalized on her birthday. Over the last six months, she’s undergone chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant and CAR T Cell immunotherapy. But nothing we’ve tried has worked.
I’m looking up into the same sky as I did nearly 40 years ago, knowing that it is my destination, someday hopefully a long time from now. Not today, though.
Today, as I peer over to her lying on a hospital bed, I know that the sky and stars are my Mom’s destination. With her, I send these words. I love you, Mom. You made me cry today.