Orange you glad?

St. Patrick's Day held an inside joke for the two of us. We're Protestant, so we always wore orange instead of green. When the pinchers came for us, we double-pinched back, laughing as we told them how they'd been punked. Well, that's the word we'd use today, but not one she'd ever use. She was too proper for that. She would smile with a twinkle in her eyes, and I'd be the one laughing. Thirty-seven years have passed since I thought of Saint Patrick's Day without sadness; 2025 might be different.

Keep that in the back of your mind, if you will. My train of thought jumps tracks often, but if I leave that there, I'll remember my destination.

You can look through many of my serious submissions to Vocal, and you'll find frequent nods to the grief of maternal loss. I may have written some of these themes and thoughts before, but the clarity has never been sharper, and the lightbulb has never burned brighter than in the last six weeks, as my therapist has helped reduce my PTSD over my mother's premature death to almost zero. As a result, my heart and life have renewed purpose, even as the light has revealed other traumas clutching at me that have remained hidden for years. Still, if I could beat the One that Held Me for More Than Three Decades, surely I can beat those, too, right?

It was as simple as A, B, C.

It was as "simple" as A, B, C. Don't forget that I speak tongue-in-cheek on a regular basis. In many ways, it was simple. It was so simple that I wondered why countless therapists and counselors over the decades hadn't tried it before this guy did. On the other hand, I figured it just took me this long to sort out what I needed to say about Mum's death's impact on me. And her death's impact on everyone else. Because honestly, I hadn't thought much about everyone else until the last year or two.

Here are some key examples. My eldest sister was married with two children. Her two kids were the only grandkids Mum ever met out of the 25 raised by her five children, not to mention all the great-grandchildren! My brother lived in Florida. Our middle sister was living at home. She had finished her student teaching and was waiting to graduate in May. Her fiance was completing his final semester at the same college in Georgia, 1,200 miles away. This sister was cooking, helping to care for Dad and me, and working a challenging job. On top of that, she was planning her wedding while knowing her mother wouldn't live to see that joyous day.

Lastly, our youngest sister--older than I am--was also in college in Georgia (four of us attended the same school). I don't know how my siblings dealt with the process of living their lives day by day and losing Mum at the same time. It was bad for me. It must have been horrible for them. I've never dared to ask them.

As for the A, B, and C, there was simplicity but also complexity. I'm the patient, okay? So, please don't take my take as the way it's supposed to work for everyone, but I was assigned daily worksheets that had three columns (A, B, and C) and two short answer questions.

Column A was "Something Happens." (Activating Event)

Column B was "I Tell Myself Something." (Belief/Stuck Point)

Column C was "I Feel Something." (Consequence)

The first question beneath the columns asked, "Are my thoughts in Column B realistic or helpful?"

The second question is, "What can I tell myself on such occasions in the future?"

This is taken from Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD: A Comprehensive Manual by Patricia A. Resick, Candice M. Monson, and Kathleen M. Chard, (c) 2017, The Guilford Press. I tell you that so you know it's legit, but also so you don't think I'm plagiarizing their ideas. There's a heckuva lot more to what they do than these simple ABCs, but this exercise, over about three weeks, five times a week, and discussions my guy and I had, gave me an "Aha!" moment I wasn't ready for, wasn't expecting, and sent me reeling (emotionally). Lightning bolt.

Now get ready. The train is switching tracks again. There are two hospitals in the little city near my home. One offers limited care, and the other is where long-term, super-ill patients go. For my purposes, I'm going to call it Big Hospital. When I was eleven or twelve years old, Mum had a double mastectomy because of breast cancer. She usually drove herself to and from chemo treatments, and she continued working as a teacher as much as she could. I was 16 when her remission ended and 17 when she died. All of her cancer treatments took place at the Big Hospital.

I was raised by a generation that believed in sheltering children from harsh realities. Sadly, their intentions were misguided and caused more harm than good. One example is that I was frequently told that Mum was going to recover from her second struggle with cancer, and it affected my recognition of the reality that her time on earth was short. It was only in her final week that I recognized the lies for what they were, and when I visited her on her final day, the shell of the vibrant woman who had birthed and raised me lay near death on her bed, each breath rattling as she labored to hold on a few moments longer. Yes, it was St. Patrick's Day.

For years afterward, I associated St. Patrick's Day and the Big Hospital with death, and I avoided them at all costs. I hated the mention of them. I loathed anything to do with them. I experienced elevated pulse and anxiety if I had to go to Big Hospital for any reason. More than twenty years after Mum died, my wife and I moved to a new home in a town that made our weekly commute to church go past Big Hospital. Every time we drove by it, a flicker of fear or avoidance flashed through my mind.

Then, in early 2019, my wife suffered a catastrophic illness that required her to be hospitalized at the Big Hospital for a few months, including several weeks in the ICU. Within the first 72 hours, her lungs and kidneys completely shut down, and she suffered a heart attack. They came within moments of losing her. When I visited her the next day, the doctor told me, "You and your boys must prepare yourselves. She's not going to live through this."

I thanked him profusely for being direct with me. He was shocked. "Most people do not like that about me," he said. I told him of the false hopes I received about my mother many years before.

"I prefer your approach," I told him. And if she stays or goes, that is up to God. Thousands of people around the world are praying for her today."

He was surprised again. He said, "Then I will add my prayer to yours." Thirty hours later he called me at home. "I think your prayers are working. She still has a long way to go, but she will make it." (She did, with lungs reviving and kidneys functioning well enough to avoid dialysis.)

That doctor helped to ease my fear of the Big Hospital, but not completely. Added to my anxieties was my younger son's age when his mom almost died: 11. And when he was 16, she was diagnosed with cancer. And my anxiety spiked, and I connected with my current therapist. The parallels between my son's age and his mother's illnesses and my age and my mother's illnesses triggered too many negative emotions for me, and I needed big-time help to work through them.

Mum began experiencing symptoms of cancer relapse in late spring 1986, but she didn't let on about them to anyone except maybe Dad. When school began in August, she continued teaching at the little Christian school they'd helped start in 1980, and I entered my junior year at the larger Christian school on the other side of town. I wasn't happy at my school, but Mum and Dad weren't letting me move in with my cousins and go to their school in another part of the state. I was frustrated because they'd tried to get me to do that very thing the year before, and I couldn't understand why they'd changed their minds without explanation.

By Thanksgiving, Mum was becoming much sicker, but she did her best to conceal it. The Monday after the holiday, the cancer dramatically revealed itself. She drove to work, and the act of putting the car in "Park" snapped her collarbone. The diagnosis was grim: Bone cancer with no known cure. She managed to stay out of the hospital until December 26th. By then, her pain was so bad that she needed morphine to exist. From then until the middle of February, the rollercoaster of good, mediocre, and horrible days played havoc with my emotions. At least twice, my best friend's parents arrived at the high school to pick me up and take me to the hospital because it appeared to be "the end."

Suddenly, Mum came home! She was in better spirits than I'd seen since before Thanksgiving. I spent as much time with her as possible, and her friends spent the days with her when Dad had to work and I had to be at school. Those two-and-a-half weeks were terrific, but then her health deteriorated. One morning as I got ready for school, one of her nurse friends said to me, "We're going to have to call an ambulance for her today." She patted me on the shoulder after she said that, and tears welled up in my eyes.

When I wrote on the ABC chart about Mum being at home, I suddenly realized what her time at home was for. It hadn't dawned on me before, not in all the 38 years I had missed her. However, because of the layer-peeling work my therapist had already accomplished with me, this simple yet profound "Aha!" struck me between the eyes. It is indeed so simple that you probably see it already, yet as a deeply sheltered 17-year-old boy losing his beloved mom to cancer when he had just begun to appreciate her for who she was as a person, this truth was utterly lost on me until mid-November 2024: Mum had spent that brief time at home preparing to die.

All those dreadful weeks before that, her doctors were trying to get her well enough to spend even 17 days at home in her favorite spaces before she left the earth forever. During those 17 days, she affirmed her love for me and her approval of my taste in music and my skills for life.

It was in that wee moment of clarity that my heart was unlocked. The fear and avoidance of the Big Hospital fluttered free. The negative associations tied to St. Patrick's Day were snipped, and I finally saw her smile and twinkling eyes again. Memories I'd lost to PTSD have returned as I've lost PTSD. The Protestant in me asks, "Orange you glad?"