We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations. -Charles R. Swindoll

She was my mom. And she died sixteen years ago today. So I’m thinking about her today.

Let me tell you about her, what I remember of her.

Her name was Celeste. I’ve always thought her name was so beautiful. Celeste Bell has a certain elegance to it that still ricochets around my head when I speak her name. When I think it.

She was about five foot six as an adult and petite, which earned her the childhood nickname “Itzy.” It stuck. Her childhood friends still thought of her as Itzy until the day she died, probably many days after.

There is so much I can’t remember that I try not to think about. It’s easier to think about her preferences than the sound of her laugh, for instance, which I can’t remember at all.

She loved Cocoa Krispies. She loved Pepsi and the doctors eventually made her give it up. She loved to have her hair brushed, not combed, by one of us.

My mom was a spitfire, a firebrand, a woman with seafoam green-blue eyes that could melt you with a single glance.

I can’t remember her pregnant, but I can remember her picking off the dead skin on a burn I got from spilling tomato soup down my thigh. I screamed, kicked, cried. Hot tears poured down my face as she held me tight in her grip…this is for your own good, she was saying. Something like that.

Who remembers the exact words?

Through the years people have tried to set the record straight about her for me. This is how your mom really was, said one of her former lovers. This was the real Celeste. Even at thirteen, with a forked tongue I’d spit fuck you keep your stories to yourself. I know who she was.

And indeed, I know who she was. I know she could see through walls so we’d better be good. I believed that. Truth about our mothers is we believe what we want to believe. Keep your stories about my mom to yourself, I have mine about her and those strands of memory are all I have left of a woman with a spirit so huge she could swallow the entire world.

She did swallow the entire world. Mom told her mom, my grandmother, to stop turning up the oxygen. My grandmother couldn’t bear the thought, turned the oxygen up a little more as mom slept.

This really happened. Who knows why these things happen.

Green oxygen tanks in the basement taller than I was at the time. Nosebleeds that turned my world upside down. So that even today I sometimes listen to the squall of a passing ambulance and stand still, petrified to imagine the suffering at the other end of that journey.

She died around 5:30 in the morning on November 30th, 1992. The night before I had massaged her upper body while my grandmother massaged her lower half. She was skin and bones. We used unscented lotion that I can still smell.

Bill Clinton had just won the election - mom had a Ross Perot button and, to the best of my memory was a big fan. Although that could be because she thought he had huge ears and a funny voice.

Mom won’t be at my wedding next year in March and I selfishly wish she could be. I selfishly wish she could meet my husband-to-be, see his eyes fill with tears as I talk about her.

It’s a funny thing, death. Meet it once and you always know its presence. You always know its promise. It will come. It won’t be pretty.

What can we do now, today, with this moment? That’s the question I constantly find myself asking. How can I practice like my hair’s on fire not knowing when a diagnosis might come. There’s this hokey Tim McGraw song (and, I just discovered, equally hokey video) about this man who gets diagnosed with something and then he starts really living. I’ve decided I don’t want to wait until the day the x-rays come up positive. Today is good enough for living to the fullest. Now is the right time.

She died just after Thanksgiving, was buried December 3rd, just a few weeks before Christmas. The holidays are a time for celebrating and we mourned. We mourned the only way we knew how. For a woman who fought until she spoke her last five words: Oh God, oh my God.

The holidays may be a time to celebrate life, but for me, they are also a time to remember those who are suffering, dying, have died. Try as I have to cordon off this death, it visits me every year around this time. The days get shorter, the weather turns dark, moody. I think of a woman with seafoam green-blue eyes, reflect on life with her and since. Honor her spirit by breathing deeply, saying a tiny prayer and sending out compassion to you and to all beings, everywhere. May I and all beings be at ease.