Time Flies

One thing that I have learned recently is that you can actually sleepwalk through forty years of life and wonder how in the hell you got to be where you are now. I look at my beautiful mother and see an active, vital woman who still drives, goes fishing, roots for the Cubbies and the Bears, gardens and feeds the birds; then my mind clears and there is an elderly woman in a wheelchair sitting before me. She is missing a leg, oxygen dependent, has four nebulizer treatments a day, and the steroids that help her breathe raise her blood sugar making insulin necessary. I want to tell her to quit pulling my leg and get up, she still has too much living to do. But this is reality, and when I hug her I notice her arms just don't have the strength they once did, and I am alarmed to realize that our days together really are numbered. They always have been of course, but especially now. It would be so much easier to take if she could still do all of the things that she loves to do. I keep trying to turn back the clock that took her from living to just existing, because it's killing me to see her like this. Life can be so very cruel, and besides, I'm nowhere near ready to let her go. How could this be happening to us already? Where did all of those years go?