Chicken Soup for the Girl's Soul by Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen & Patty Hansen & Irene Dunlap

Author:Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen & Patty Hansen & Irene Dunlap
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780757394911
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, LLC
Published: 2010-08-30T07:00:00+00:00

Hero

Who ran to help me when I fell

And would some pretty story tell

Or kiss the place to make it well?

My mother.

Jane Taylor

Have you ever had someone in your life who made you think you could conquer anything? Someone who could make you smile even when you felt like all you could do was cry? My mom was that for me.

My mom took the bad things in life and turned them into miracles. If I was upset and crying, she was there with a bright smile that made all the troubles in the world seem minuscule compared to her brightly lit face. Sometimes I think she could have eclipsed the sun with that smile. I still see that smile sometimes—like when I wake up to a loud alarm clock beeping in my ear telling me it’s time to start another day, or when I’m sitting in class and I just can’t conjugate that Spanish sentence. I’m about to give up, and then there it is, that beautiful smile.

As a child, your worst fear is death. You don’t really know what it is. You know it’s sad. You know that it’s something you don’t want to happen to the two people in your life that you love the most . . . your parents. As scary moments go, that’s one of the worst. As you get older, you come to the realization that nothing lasts forever and that you aren’t going to last forever either.

But we never think that it is going to happen to us immediately. When people usually talk about death, we speak as if it’s something that’s going to happen so far into the future that we needn’t worry about it. Sometimes we may wonder how it’s going to happen—if it will be painful. We wonder if we will get to tell those friends and family members just how much they meant to us.

When I thought about my parents dying, I always thought of them as being old when it happened, and it stopped there. I never got past the old part. I never made it to what actually happened.

Thoughts like that were running through my mind the day my mom died. So many things were running through my mind—unanswered questions and unspoken words are what I remember pounding in my head. I can remember every second of the day my mom died, every single tear that streamed down my face.

I was thirteen, on the brink of leaving my preteen years behind me. I woke up that morning refreshed. It was Sunday. Mom was still asleep on the couch, so I figured I would just pull out some food and turn on the TV and keep the volume low. At around two o’clock, my mom started snoring really loudly. I turned around and looked at her; she looked really peaceful, but she sounded like a train. Later I would find out why.

I just smiled and went back to my program. A few minutes later, I decided that I needed to take a shower and get packed to go to my dad’s house.

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