My mother died of cancer on February 6, 2025.
She was a truly exceptional woman.
The fierce prairie winds of the Nebraska Sandhills immediately keyed in on the fact that in my haste to pack a bag, I had forgotten a winter coat. With the “feels like” temps in the negatives for days on end, the dismal gray skies obstructing any warmth that might otherwise have come from direct exposure to sunlight, my streak of days running without a break in 2025 came to an end on Monday, February 3, a mere thirty-three days in. I had arrived in my hometown of Valentine the morning before, early, just as the pitch black of a place unencumbered by light pollution began to recede. When I got to the hospital, my mother could still speak, but it was one word at a time, a soft staccato of sounds that my father, whose hearing aids had run out of battery the day before, struggled to interpret. It was a small blessing for me, with slightly better hearing, to have something that felt mildly useful to do, relaying the messages that arrived between ragged breaths.
Not a month prior, Sonja and the kids and I had met mom and dad for lunch at the Coachlight on our way through Valentine. Mom ate a sandwich and paid the check for all of us before escorting us back over to the bookstore and spoiling the kids rotten with her undeniable generosity, as much a part of her personality as her stoic facial expressions and unparalleled work ethic. Nothing seemed out of place to us then. I don’t think she knew, either.
Two weeks later, I burnt a hole in the asphalt in the Houston Marathon, shattering my own personal best time by nearly five minutes by taking advantage of great weather and a course that was almost as flat as a track. Upon crossing the finish line, I was disappointed to note that Sonja, who normally follows along on my races and messages to tell me how great I am, seemed not to have watched. “Give me a call when you have time,” was her only message. When I did, I learned that my mother had been med-evac’d to Omaha twelve hours before. I hurried through my shower and rushed to the airport to try to catch an early flight home.
The next ten days were spent with mom in her hospital room, dad always at her side. She remained strong, her vicelike grip on my hand reassuring despite the circumstances, and funny, cracking sardonic jokes about mortality among other things. A nurse of fifty years—the same amount of time she’d spent married to my father—she told me as one of the less helpful of her caretakers exited our company “Try always to be a good patient.” Then, with a wry smile she added, “But slap ‘em if you have to.”
They took her back to Valentine in an ambulance for hospice care. There would be no chemotherapy, no radiation, no desperate attempts to postpone the designs of the universe, only the inevitable outcome that awaits us all. At first, I wasn’t sure I’d follow her home, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I must. Thus, I arrived in Valentine on Sunday morning, broke my running streak on Monday, and spent the rest of the week in grateful awe of the community I’d left behind so long ago.
In the days that followed a seemingly endless stream of nurses, many of them retired, poured through the door. They spoke always to her, sometimes to me as well, telling her how much she had taught them, how much she meant to the hospital and the town as well as to them personally. My classmates, too, provided an unexpected source of comfort, reaching out, taking me to get a drink when I needed one—which I almost always did. Dr. Senseny had my father and I out to dinner more than once, while Mark and Amber, my former classmate and his lovely wife, did likewise. I saw so many people that I hadn’t seen in years, many that I hadn’t seen since I graduated almost twenty-six years ago. As every moment I spent with mom crept closer to the last, I saw my community through eyes that previously I never had.
I went down to mom’s store on main street and took down the Christmas decorations, then put up the Valentine’s Day ones. I went for a run on the trail now and then, patronized all of the local spots for sustenance, and spent as much time with mom and her visitors as I could. The nurses and their stories were a catharsis I would never have realized was available to me, and for all of my accomplishments in life, whatever those may amount to, I realized that my mother’s impact on that small town was more profound than I had ever known, and that despite the lack of recognition that often comes with the things I do, she had made a tremendous and enviable impact in the world. I knew my mom was a force, but I admit I never realized just how incredible she was. “Your mom saved my life” was a phrase I heard ten, fifteen times, possibly more over the course of only a few days—and those were just the people who sought me out to tell me so. In the end, I had to wonder if there would have been anyone left alive in that blessed prairie hamlet if not for my mother and the decades she poured into nursing there.
My mother died at 6:15 in the morning on Thursday, the 6th of February, 2025. “My mother is no longer in pain” is the single, simple line I managed to pen into my journal. Dad woke me with a phone call around 6:30, and I was dressed and to the hospital in ten minutes. The details about what came next are, for now, my own, and I’m not ready to belabor those points in writing yet, except to say that in the afternoon I ran a half marathon on the Cowboy Trail, then proceeded to drink a bit too much alcohol before going to bed that night. I regret nothing. I’m only glad I was there with my father, and with all of he and my mother’s friends, until the end of her amazing life.
Nobody dies of natural causes. In the end, something kills us all, whether it’s a disease or an accident or being eaten by a grizzly bear (which would be my personal preference, were I to have my druthers). Cancer killed my mother, just as it did my grandfather, and it may well have its way with me one day. So it goes. What matters isn’t how we die, but how we live, and my mother lived well, though not as long as any of us would have liked. This month, I’ve committed to running a hundred miles to help raise money to fight cancer, in the hope that perhaps others with that terrible disease in its seemingly countless forms might prolong their lives a bit more than we were able to do for mom. So far in February I’ve run thirty miles, and once I finish writing this I plan to add a few more to that total. If you’d like, you can donate to the American Cancer Society as part of my February running in honor of my mother at this link:
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Mark1737381807304
To all of you who were there for my mother, who are there for my father now, and who reminded me this past month of just how amazing a woman she really was, thank you. I have yet to fully process the idea of living in a world without my mom, but I have my wife and children and my friends—and running, my favorite form of therapy—to help me do it. As I watch the Super Bowl with my family tonight, a game that my mom and I sometimes watched together back in the 90’s when the Bills could never seem to get over that last hurdle, I’ll be thinking of her. And next weekend, as my family and I return to Valentine for the festivities of Bull Bash and the Valentine’s Day holiday, once again I’ll be thinking of my mom. If you have a favorite memory of her that you’d like to share, I’d be grateful to hear it sometime, and if you didn’t know her, well, perhaps you do a little now. If you’re able, give your mother a hug today. I wish that I had done more of that.