It started with a headache. A headache that lasted 4 days.
A headache that no medication, coffee, hot shower, cold shower, nor amount of sleep could subdue. I called my doctor, I’ve had headaches before and this was no cause for concern, he said. And then, in the middle of the night… it popped.
As sudden as the headache had come it was gone, and I felt or heard, a “pop” in my head that woke me from my sleep, followed by a warm sensation rushing through my brain. A friend had recently lost her mother to a brain aneurysm and I thought “This is it,” as I shook my husband awake and frantically called 911.
I sat on the carpet in our hallway, rocking back and forth while clutching my knees as I waited for the ambulance, and distantly heard the dispatcher’s voice in my ear, as I asked my husband to turn on his video camera.
I heard my daughter crying in her crib as I repeated over and over “She will never remember me,” and began a dialogue in to my husband’s phone that I prayed she would never have to hear.
“Hi baby, I’m your mama. And I love you so very very much.”
And that was the night my life changed.
Not because the next 2 years would be consumed by health struggles and hurdles, because although those changed my body, it was my mind that was changed that night.
The way I thought about life, and the way I had been living it, would never be the same.
It’s hard to explain motherhood to someone who hasn’t experienced it, but the best way I have heard it described is that a piece of your heart walks outside of your body once your child is born. And as the paramedics arrived that night and began their work, I realized that if those were to be my final moments, the tiny piece of my soul that was crying out my name from the next room would never have a chance to know me. In fact, she wouldn’t even remember me. All she would have is what I left behind; pictures, written notes, and most importantly, the stories people told her of me.
And I asked myself on that ride to the hospital, what would those stories be?
And I didn’t like the answer.
So I made the decision to change it.
As a mother, as a parent, as someone who walks this earth and interacts with others, I ask you to ask yourself, what will be said about you when you are gone?
