It’s a tough day for us, from any angle. Both my wife and I have already lost our mothers (and fathers, and all our grandparents). I was very close with my mother. When I had cancer in 2002 she would come by my house every day and just sit with me. We could talk four hours and hours, she and I. I remember the comfort she brought to me then being palpable, even ten years later, like the way the first taste of honey dripping from the spoon tickles your taste buds.

It’s a good memory and I think of it often, particularly since it means I am over ten years cancer-free, but I miss her terribly. She died in 2004. Officially, it was a blood clot to the brain, but she had rheumatoid arthritis which really isn’t “arthritis” at all (at least not in the way most people think of it—it is an auto-immune disease, which cripples you while it makes it more difficult to fight off infections). She went into the hospital at a (relatively) healthy sixty years young, a common cold having turned to pneumonia. She nearly died three weeks into her coma (the renal dipstick, I mean, specialist, told us there was no hope—she was about 12-years-old and in Birkenstocks. I’ll never forget that, either; probably went to a really cool school and pulled awesome grades), and then “miraculously” our fighting mother’s kidneys popped back online just as we had told Birkenstocks they would.

She was going to make it. Then she got a staph infection (from being in the hospital) and a clot in her heart broke free, traveled all the way to her brain, and killed her.

That’s not true. We killed her. When we removed her from life support on Easter Sunday. She wouldn’t have wanted to live the way she would have had to live. She wouldn’t have been herself. She would have needed someone to do everything for her, and that would be if she survived first the hospital (already 45 days in bed) and then 6-8 months of intense physical therapy just to counteract all the atrophy, so she could lie in a bed the rest of her days. Or, if she was lucky, a wheelchair once in a while to marvel at spring the way she always did (though we knew she’d be incapable of marveling ever again).

None of it made the decision any easier or the guilt over the years any less demonic.

We killed her. We sat with her while she died, beside her bed, my brother, my sister, and me.

I felt her soul as it passed through me, just after whispering in her ear “it’s okay, we’re okay, you can go now.”

Our father—her soulmate for twenty-seven years—had been gone since a heart attack took him in ninety-three. She missed him every day, and that was one of the things that made me proudest of her: the fact that she still stayed happy, never once even considered meeting someone else. She already had a husband, and he was meeting her at another time, just down the road.

Doctors are not gods. They are not even necessarily good drivers. They’re just people who studied about the human body.

My advice? Shop around. I had a friend who was told by two respected hospitals’ oncologists to take his colon cancer home with him and prepare the things we prepare when we and our colon cancer aren’t going to be around anymore. Twenty percent, they said, his chance of survival.

Twenty percent? My friend figured he’d never finished lower than the eightieth percentile in anything in his life and called the Mayo Clinic.

He’s still around, almost twenty years later. His colon cancer took a powder.

This day is also hard because my wife and I lost our son to SIDS in 2008 when he was two months old. We didn’t actually lose him. He died, too. His name was Brody—Brody John Guthrie, middle name from his maternal grandfather, who was the only of our parents to meet him and who died himself a few months later. Brody was the miracle pregnancy and he was born on Christmas Day, a C-section already scheduled for the 26th.

Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day. Holidays are tough on my family.

2008 was a tough. We lost a dog and a job that year, too.

But my wife is still a mother, just as my mom was always still a wife.

Her son’s waiting just down the road a bit.

Not far, yet never close enough.