How do you measure the life of a woman or a man? Measure in love.

I was going to wait to do this until the end of day on March 31st, but I feel called to do this now. Been laying in bed for over an hour and my mind won't shut off.

Most of you know that one year ago today, my mom passed away. She fought a brave battle with kidney cancer, but unfortunately it spread far and wide throughout her body. She was 54 years old.

She led an amazing life in her 54 years on Earth. I KNOW when she entered Heaven, she was greeted by Jesus with a smile, and he told her, "well done, good and faithful servant." You see, my mom was, without a doubt, one of the kindest people I've ever met in my life. And I'm not saying that just because she's related to me. I think that's why she ended up in human resources, and worked her way up to becoming an HR Director for a non-profit. She listened to people, judged their situation fairly, and still won over every single coworker, which is hard to do in HR. I remember her telling me stories about cases she was working on with vague details because she couldn't discuss a whole lot, even though she knew there was no chance I would have been able to share anything, because it was the right thing to do, to respect the privacy of her coworkers.

She was southern-she grew up in Manassas, Virginia, and moved to Raleigh because her in-laws moved down there. But she was always, always close to her mom and sister, who still live in Virginia-I think she talked to my Aunt Laura pretty much every night on the phone, sometimes for hours. I wonder now if that ever got on my dad's nerves a bit. :) Some of my best memories from my childhood come from our annual beach vacations with that side of the family in Myrtle Beach. She did not have a southern accent, at least not in my opinion-I guess because Manassas is close to Washington, DC, maybe? I don't think I have an accent for the same reason-Raleigh is such a transplant city with people moving in from all over the country.

Accent or no accent, she instilled quite a few southern traditions in me; namely, sweet tea. She made the BEST sweet tea-oh lord, it was sweet. I'm sure there was enough sugar in there to put a diabetic in a coma. There was always a pitcher of it in the fridge. When we discovered Bojangles, a southern fast food chain, it was like mecca. Homemade biscuits, dirty rice, cajun spiced fried chicken, seasoned french fries, and sweet tea. I still crave it and it's the first place I go after getting off the plane when I go back home. I can't tell you how many times we'd swing through the drive thru after a long day of running errands and recharge our batteries with a large sweet tea and maybe a side of fries, extra seasoning.

On any given weekend you could find mom, my sister, and I out and about running random errands or shopping at the mall. Before a mall was built 10 minutes from our house, the closest mall was about 40 minutes away. It was a special treat to go there, and we often spent all day out there. My sister, Lyndsay, and I got to have hot dogs from the food court, shop in the hello kitty store, and browse in Limited Too and whatever other tween stores we were into at the time. We NEVER let her live down the time we were walking by a Godiva chocolate store and she saw a display of chocolate covered strawberries. Thinking they were samples, she reached her hand in and was about to grab one when the store clerk came running over exclaiming they were for sale only-and I think it was a pretty ridiculous price, something like 3-4 bucks PER strawberry.

As we got older we tolerated letting mom have some shopping time, and she became attached to big, chunky necklaces. Over time she gathered quite a collection, and I began to see them as a part of her. No matter what she was wearing, she always had some sort of funky necklace or scarf on. She began to take us with her when she got manicures and eyebrow waxes at her favorite spa in Wakefield. Ultimately it wasn't the stuff that was collected in these visits that Lyndsay and I cherish-it's all that time that she carved out to be with us.

When I entered my junior year of high school, I started doing color guard with the marching band. She quickly became the guard mom, and traveled with us to all of our competitions. Since our high school was brand spankin' new (my junior year was the first year the marching band existed), our guard was really small and we were very close. She held our emergency bag of bobby pins, sewing kits, lipstick, and God knows what else, helped carry flags, fix our hair, whatever we needed, she was there. People who didn't know her well might have said she was soft spoken-I guess that comes from her HR training, to be calm and collected. But she definitely wasn't afraid to put people in their place when it needed to be done. I'll never forget a competition where my band director was being a grade a asshole. (TMI warning) I had my period and HAD to go to the bathroom, if you know what I'm saying. He didn't want anyone to go, for reasons I still don't understand, and when I got back he screamed at me and made me feel like I had just robbed a bank or something. She calmly stood up and said, "Did you realize my daughter was on her period and needed to change her tampon? What would you have liked her to do, bleed through her uniform and get it all over the bus?" He turned BRIGHT red, and later pulled me aside and gave me a sincere apology.

Lyndsay and I were pretty active with school stuff: color guard, winter guard, choir, plays. She never missed any of it. I did color guard in UNC's marching band my first two years of college, and she and my dad would come just to see me perform at half time and then leave after that. She's shown me that working moms absolutely can make time to support their kids if they are determined to do it.

She was never into computers much. She never got a facebook account, and told us that after spending her work day on the computer, the last thing she wanted to do was come home and get right back on one. She loved, loved, loved to read, and I inherited that from her. She'd take Lyndsay and I to the Wake Forest public library every Saturday morning when we were little-I checked out stacks of Baby Sitter's Club books, Lyndsay got Blue Bird picture books. Then we'd go next door to the candy/coffee shop that always smelled amazing. She'd get coffee and Lyndsay and I would get cherry cokes. She had a particular affinity for Steven King books. Gotta be honest, I still don't really get that :) but she loved them! Maybe that goes along with some of her favorite movies, like the Aliens series and Terminator. She liked chick flick type of stuff too, but the Aliens thing was always sort of a surprise to me. One of her favorite tv shows was Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre World. So this sweet, petite, well mannered woman totally LOVED to watch Andrew eat pig testicles or whatever crazy concoction was on the show.

Her marriage to my dad was atypical. People just don't have the connection they had. They met in high school-in chemistry class. She couldn't light her bunsen burner and had my dad light it for her. They were engaged at the end of their senior year of high school and got married the summer after they graduated from college. They were together 31 years. I'm not naive, and I'm sure they had their up and down moments and thoughts of 'man, you annoy the CRAP out of me!' as we all do, but their love was special. You could just see it in the way they looked at each other. I hope I can have that with Michael as we grow older.

She loved animals-specifically, cats. I remember when I was 6 or 7 and a thin, scraggly looking calico kitten wandered on our back porch on Christmas Eve. We didn't have animals at the time and didn't have any cat food, but my mom couldn't just let the little thing mew at her and not give her anything. So she gave the kitten beans and chopped up hot dog (aka beenie weenie). After that, it was a done deal. I'm sure Lyndsay and I thought mom and dad were letting us keep the cat for us, but there was no mistaking it: that cat (that we named Patches) was my mom's cat. When Patches passed away in 2006, it hit my mom pretty hard. It wasn't too long before my dad took her to the shelter, where she found a gray tabby who poked her paw through the cage and stole my mom's heart. That was Izzy, who became a shadow to my mom. And so was it any surprise that one day I would pick up a fluffy orange cat off the street, walk him up 3 flights of stairs to my apartment, and clean him up with baby wipes because he smelled so bad? ;)

Christmas was her favorite holiday. She made it a big deal, even though when we were growing up we didn't celebrate the religious parts of it. But she'd decorate the entire house, and we'd go out each December and get a live pine tree. She loved to collect ornaments and it seemed like she got a few new ones each year. She became famous within our family and neighborhood for her homemade cinnamon rolls-I swear, she could have gone into business with them, they were that good. On Christmas Eve, she'd spend the entire day in the kitchen making everything from scratch, with my sister and I helping to ice them (and taste test). I think the recipe she had called for around 50, and she usually tripled that. Once they were all done and packaged in colored saran wrap, dad would drive Lyndsay and me around to the neighbors houses to drop off the rolls. Our favorite part of Christmas Eve was getting pizza after that-because what woman in her right mind would cook dinner after all that?-and drive around Raleigh to look at Christmas lights. Her birthday was Dec 26th, and if she ever felt annoyed by that, she didn't really show it. It was nice because she'd be home, so we would go to after Christmas sales, go the movies, out to eat at her favorite restaurants. We tried to not be 'those people' that lumped her Christmas and birthday presents in one gift. For a few years she was collecting her china pattern, so that seemed like a pretty easy gift for my dad to get. She opened up a present from him and we were all speechless. It was a huge, rose pattern vase (to be fair, it WAS in her china pattern) with handles. Finally she said, "Is it a trophy?" And that was it-we HOWLED we were laughing so hard. To this day when we see that in her china hutch we sometimes point to it when my dad is in the room and I think that annoys him, but it makes us smile.

She found God again. I don't know a whole lot about her history with her faith in her childhood, only that she was required to go to a very conservative church twice a week with her family, and by the time she was on her own, she'd had enough. Whatever burned her out was so bad that she never took my sister and I when we were growing up. But somehow, in 2006 she decided to check out a Lutheran church in Raleigh. Then slowly, she and my dad started attending more and more. Before I knew it, she was calling me to tell me they were taking a membership class, were meeting people in the church, and her voice just sounded different. I don't know how to describe it, really, except to say that she seemed complete. When I came home from college I would go with them every now and then on a Sunday, and it was amazing how my parents had woven themselves into this community. They'd introduce me to all these people, and it was evident they had a family there. Her pastor and her friends from that church were there for her when she was first diagnosed in 2006, through remission, and when it came back in 2009 until the very end. Pastor Diane gave the sermon at her funeral-full circle, I suppose. But we could all see the emotion in her as she spoke about my mom, beautifully sending off one of her flock to heaven. That was hard, but I don't know what my family would have done without the support of St. Philip.

In a few hours some of my best friends from EastLake will be coming over. I'm going to have a Lord of the Rings movie marathon. It was one of her absolute favorites-she made Lyndsay and I go see the first film 9 times in the theater with her. She had posters of each movie framed in our computer room and even branched out beyond the trilogy into some of Tolkein's more scholarly works. Going to see The Hobbit, whenever that comes out, will be bittersweet, because I know she would have been eager to see it as well. So this will be a good way for me to remember her today, as I think about my beautiful, amazing mother, who taught me to love with every ounce of my heart, to listen to people when they're hurting, and changed me for the better. The closing of her life opened a new chapter in mine, and for that I will have to thank her whenever it is that I see her again. My pain that I experienced over the last year eventually gave way to a desperate need to seek God, and through that I found EastLake, and then found hope, a church family, healing, and the knowledge that God didn't put me in a valley to leave me there-he met me there, walked me out of it, and made me whole again.

I feel like this could have been her speaking to me last year, as Frodo says to Sam in The Return of the King: "My dear Sam. You cannot always be torn in two. You will have to be one and whole for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be and to do. Your part in the story will go on."

Love you, mom. Miss you, every single day. But thank you-thank you for the lessons you taught me while you were here, and for the ability to grow in my faith after you left. It's because of you that I'm the person I am today. I can't wait to see you again one day-and I know that we will, because I know where you are, and I'll meet you there. But not yet.