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Right around the turn of the Millenium I got interested in tracing the family roots. Mom was in declining health and advancing in age, and we visited the Old Country to help with her move to an assisted living facility. That’s when I got a fresh look at old photo albums. I had been hounding Mom for years to please, please put names & places on all the bundles of loose photos, too. She had made a nice start on the family tree in one album, but most other pictures were still unidentified. A couple of years later I visited one last time with Mom, who was then very frail – but still had her marbles – and we managed to get a few more identifications done, in addition to just verbal “begats” that I frantically wrote down.
Sadly, that was our last in-person visit. Our weekly phone calls continued for a few more weeks, until one Sunday morning when 
the voice on the other end was not that of Mom, but rather that of my cousin. Yes. He didn’t really have to spell it out. Mom had started her final decline Saturday afternoon, and died early Sunday morning. Overwhelming sadness, as most experience even when the news is not entirely unexpected. The separation was very painful for me, and I just hope that Mom was not suffering the way I was during her transition. Saturday, I woke up with a splitting headache that rapidly developed into one of the worst migraines I’ve ever experienced. None of my usual remedies brought relief – rather, the pain was getting worse as the day wore on. Then, late evening, it suddenly lifted. Just like that – pouf, it was gone! Strangely, the timing of that headache-turned-migraine corresponded perfectly with the progression of Mom’s final struggle – that migraine lifted at the time of Mom’s passing.
I’m no “mystic”, or any kind of supernatural fanatic. I’d LIKE to believe in a lot of these things, and I think there’s definitely something there – though too commonly there’s too much effort put into “making it so”, leading to it loosing credibility by being too far-fetched. I don’t know just what the significance was of my migraine – but I am convinced that it was somehow connected to Mom’s death. The time-line is too parallel for it to not be.
In our lives together, Mom and I both suffered occasional migraines, Mom’s were probably worse – and definitely more frequent – than mine. Since Mom’s death, I have not had a single migraine. Headaches, yes, but not those debilitating migraines. It’s been almost 11 years, by now.
Today, February 18, is the anniversary of Dad’s passing. Unbelievably, it’s been 31 years since this wonderful man left his earthly life – and I still shed tears of missing him. At the time of 
Dad’s death I was in close physical proximity, unlike with Mom’s. Dad was fading away in a hospital bed, it was only a matter of time, as “they” say. Mom, myself, and our dear friends/neighbors took turns at his bedside, never leaving him alone. On the evening of February 17 I had finished a long “shift” at his side, and our friends showed up to relieve me. Ordinarily, I would have left right away and either visited with other friends, or commiserated at home with Mom. This evening, however, I couldn’t leave. Nothing seemed to have changed with Dad’s condition at this point, but something just kept me there, despite our friends’ insistence that I go get some rest. I just sat at Dad’s side, holding his hand most of the time. Sometime after midnight it became apparent that Dad’s condition had changed – a “restlessness” had set in. A little while later the rattling last breaths of my beloved Dad brought home how the world can change from one minute to the next.
I was young and didn’t have a clue, as the saying goes, when Dad was declining, and the last thing I would have consciously recognized at that time would have been impending death. Yet – SOMEthing kept me at Dad’s side, that night.
There are many, many coincidences in life, which indeed, I do recognize. A myriad of other instances of “fortuitous choices” litter everybody’s, including mine, life – but these two, they really seem to illuminate how strong bonds of love, and blood, can be. It may sound kooky but it warms my heart that the bond to Mom and Dad was so strong that they somehow invited me to their journeys.
Undying Love
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