Lesley writes about the significance of today’s date in her life.

In September, 1997, my mother called me at work one afternoon from Methodist North hospital. Jack had another heart attack. They weren’t going to do bypass surgery this time, but were going to perform angioplasty instead. She was upset. She’d spent years monitoring his diet, feeding him nothing but fish and chicken and vegetables, making sure he was exercising and not drinking beer and he was still having trouble. His heart disease was just not letting up. My most vivid memory during that time was seeing him in the hospital with his blood pressure artificially lowered. He could barely move or speak, but when I noted that his blood pressure was my normal blood pressure and that my cholesterol was in double digits, he feebly joked that I needed switch blood vessels with him.

When my mother called me that January morning in 1999, she was crying. She’d never been crying any other time. She’s a very strong woman, very good in crisis mode. She told me I need to come to the hospital right away and that she was in the chapel. Not the ICU waiting room; the chapel. I grabbed my purse and stopped by my boss’s office, “I’m sorry, I have to leave. I think my stepfather has died.”

Read the whole thing. I think many of us can relate to the emotions that she writes of and how very hard it is to make our parents feel better when they have lost the one they love.