Never let a day go by without telling your loved ones how much you care. Never let a day go by without showing your loved ones how much they mean to you.

Tomorrow might be too late.

***

Never much liked the feel and smell of hospitals. All that antiseptic hiding the smells of sickness and death. Mom had her first heart attack on the day before her birthday on the 21st of August, and hid it from us because she didn't want us to worry. She kept insisting she was fine, "she just wasn't feeling well."

The one moment I will never forget as long as I live? If was the 22nd of August, I had that feeling that something was wrong and kept peeking into her room.

We were visiting her sister, and Mom noticed me sneak a quick look around the door.

She stared right at me and said: "Don't worry, I promise I won't die," and I think she believed it, but the small voice in me, that is never wrong, didn't agree.

I was twenty-eight at the time, I lived with my parents, and we had a family business, but I felt like a helpless kid.

We were at my cousin's house, and I insisted on calling the doctor, but there wasn't one available until Monday, and it was Sunday.

By nightfall, I called my father's sister and told her to come get us. She lived in a nearby city, and my mother had quickly deteriorated in a matter of an hour from sleepy and a little uncomfortable to struggling to breathe.

She had become pale as wax. She was sweaty and barely responding when they reached us thirty minutes later.

They had to carry her to the car, and we were in the middle of nowhere with no access to a doctor or ambulance.

My mother always had these strange brown eyes with a touch of green in them, although she denied it. That night when I looked into her eyes, the green stood out like phosphor.

We had to take two cars, and we hurtled through the darkest night I have ever seen. It rained, and on some highway in the middle of nowhere, we almost hit a drunk man stumbling across the road in dark clothes. To me, it was like an omen, and the others only saw him when it was almost too late.

We reached the nearest hospital, and when they tried to take her from us, she became agitated and begged us not to leave her alone with the doctors.

I tried to soothe her, but she made me promise I would not leave her there. It was strange, her insistence and her fear.

We gave all the medical information we could, and when they wheeled her past us to the emergency room, she cried and tried to reach out to us.

I had never seen her so fragile or so afraid, my strong, beautiful mother, that nothing could ever get down.

Her black hair had only recently turned grey. She was a woman small of stature who had led a hard life, and only in those moments did I notice how much she had aged in the last couple of years.

Odd how we don't see how the people close to us slowly give in to the ravages of time or illness.

***

I had her at the doctors twice in those last six months.

She just seemed a little tired, she smoked all her life, and I thought it might be because of that. She had osteoporosis and sometimes complained about an ache in her knee, which slowly and steadily made her hunch when she walked.

The doctor assured me she was healthy as a horse, and I didn't believe him, but she insisted that there was nothing wrong with her.

I even threatened him, telling him that if something happened to my mother, I would hold him responsible.

***

That night as they wheeled her past us, I learned a lesson. Children rarely take an interest in the lives their parents led before they had babies. We live selfishly, and there were things about her I did not know.

The doctor told us that my mom would have to have heart surgery and that she already had one minor and two major heart attacks and should be dead.

She also had a very high blood sugar count that might or might not have been caused by the heart attacks.

In the small hours of the morning, my father finally told me a truth I never knew and that my mother never wanted anyone to learn.

***

When she was sixteen years old, by which time both her parents were dead along with her brother and adopted brother, which left her living with her older half-sister, she went to see a doctor in the city and barely escaped being raped.

In those days, no one would have believed an orphan from a poor home in such a matter. She never told anyone but her family and my father, but it left her with issues that created a deep-rooted fear. Now I understood why she always insisted on going into the room with me when I had to visit the doctor.

***

The nurses led us up into a waiting room, and that night several strangers crossed our path with strange stories of faith, miracles, and odd happenings, but that is a story for another time.

All it did, as I stared over the city at the glow of neon lights in the rain, is show me that our paths are all connected in a network that either crosses like ships in the night or keeps crossing as God ties our fates together, but at some point, that line gets cut.

Even as I stood there waiting, I ignored the tiny voice in my heart trying to prepare me for the fact that my mother would never leave the hospital because I didn't want to hear it, and I believed that what I wanted, for her to live, was the right thing.

I could see those golden lines in my head like a physical thing for a brief few moments, and I was calm as I realized I wasn't alone. The Holy Spirit was with me like a warm glow inside me that comforted me.

***

The doctor told us that one side of my mother's heart had slowly hardened, making the other side work too hard.

We finally got to see her, and I nearly cried.

She looked so small on that bed, plugged full of lines and on a respirator. Her eyes lit up when she saw us, but she was mad because we left her.

I soothed her, kissed her, and she tried to cling to me, but she was so weak that she could not speak and kept indicating that she was thirsty, but we could only wet her lips.

I sensed death in that room, standing right there with us and took her hand as I prayed with all my heart that she should not die yet.

Something brushed against me and left the room.

There was nothing there that I could see, but I felt it, and the others would not believe me, but I knew the truth.

***

For twenty-two excruciating days, she seemed to be getting marginally better.

My family and I were emotionally tired to the point of numbness. We took one day and just went to visit a few places just to clear our heads, and when we returned, I could sense something wrong.

Her hand and side were bruised, she seemed fragile, afraid of the nurses, and it ate at me that we left her there alone.

The previous day a patient who had been recovering started streaming blood from her mouth and died minutes later.

Something had been off all week with patients on their way home crashing and dying, but we couldn't get any answers.

We were about to move my mother to another hospital, closer to home, when the nurses started running about. They would not tell us what was going on, but that "something" in me already realized the truth.

They called us into the emergency unit, brought my father a chair, and we watched as they tried to save my mother.

***

While I stood there, small things went through my head.

The way my constant prayers for her seemed to hit the ceiling because I understood I had asked for more time, and that was what I got. Twenty-two days to say goodbye, to tell her I love her, to show her that I cared, and I sensed that presence in the room again.

The doctors worked on her, shocked her body, gave her adrenaline, and it seemed like violence to me. As I listened to their banter and vacation plans, it was sacrilege.

When I looked at my mother again, the room felt empty of something, and I realized the presence was no longer there, and neither was her spirit still in her body.

***

The night before she wanted to tell us something, my father gave her a clipboard to write on, and when she wrote, she realized that the squiggles her hand made on the paper were not words. She could not write because her brain could not form the letters.

Tears leaked from her eyes, and she mouthed to my father that she was tired, but she wasn't only physically tired. Although I only grasped this later.

Dad said she would be fine, but I looked at her when she looked at him, and there was something like pity in her eyes, sorrow.

I think she accepted the reality of the situation before we did.

Mom got agitated when we told her she would go home, and we could not understand. I guess she already knew she would go home, but not the one we meant.

She said goodbye to me as best she could, made me understand she loved me, and clung to my hand with surprising strength.

Strangely she looked better, and when people that ill seem to recover, it is not always a good sign.

The nurse actually said it to me that evening, and I got mad at her.

This wasn't fancily written. It is still too raw a wound after nearly sixteen years.