Almost two months ago to the day and two days before I was to leave for France, I received a call that my mother had a fall and was being taken in an ambulance to the hospital. MP and I met my brother John at the hospital to find that, although my mom was in some pain, she was OK. They ran x rays and decided that she should stay overnight so they could make sure nothing was really wrong.

As I said this was two months ago, and she never left the hospital system and she has not walked on her own since. The Friday night she fell she was having dinner with her friend and was living on her own in her town home as she has lived in for 30 years. Now she is in skilled nursing rehab learning to walk again and to gain mobility. This was an amazing metamorphosis as she will probably never go back to her town home again. We have found her a new home in the Hampton at Tanglewood in what is called assisted living with the emphasis on “aging in place”. This is where she probably will be for the rest of her life.

This all has happened in less than two months. The part that I really didn’t count on was that somewhere along this path, she lost a lot of her mental functioning. We are not sure if she had a stroke or just the stress of all what happened, but dementia and short term memory loss and functioning has changed her forever. It is as if God just wiped certain things from her memory and gave her the gift of not having to worry about the millions of things she worried about daily. She is a wonderfully organized woman who had all her paperwork arranged in case just this type of incident happened, so all the details fell into place beautifully.

I am having a hard time with this change. There was a fork in the road and she took it and our family system is forever changed. I know that this is a huge gift for us all and it is what we all go through, it is just really hard to see this happen. So today I sit in a different spot in life and am realizing how my mom continues to teach and love our family through her different ways. Who would of thought this is what the fork in the road would have looked like and who would have thought this is how she would have chosen to show us her love. One more amazing lesson on expectations, fear, change, love, and faith………..thanks Mom, I love you.