31 Days - 2014 logoHello, and welcome to Day 25 of 31 Days of Life in South Africa!  Are you looking for this week’s Five Minute Friday?  It’s right over here.  And you won’t want to miss the amazing giveaway from Fistbump Media — a fabulous offer where everyone is a winner!  Click here to read all about it.

For today, it’s time to write for five minutes on the word ENJOY.

Here we go ..

 

It was a gift I never imagined.

A round-trip plane ticket from Cape Town to Michigan to visit my mother for her 59th birthday.  We hadn’t spent her birthday together for over eight years, and it ended up being her last one here on earth.

Mom was dying of cancer.

I confided in a friend that although I was thrilled with such a generous and completely unexpected providence, I was nervous about what I would find on the other side.  Nervous about how bad she had gotten, how much her condition had deteriorated in ways that couldn’t be perceived via a Skype screen.

“Just enjoy it,” my friend said.

I have no idea why those three words stuck with me, but they did.

Perhaps because I’m the type to stress over needless details and “what if’s” and work myself up over things that haven’t even transpired.

It seemed such simple advice, and yet so hard.

But I listened.  And I enjoyed it.  Yes, there were hard aspects of trying to sleep with the oxygen machine buzzing and humming, and me terrified that I might wake up in the morning and Mom would’ve breathed her last.  I was scared that the machine would lie, and make me think it was still giving her breath, when really she was gone.
But more than that, we laughed.  We painted.  We ate good food.  We talked.  And we enjoyed that birthday like there was no tomorrow.

Because there might not have been.