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My mom and my step-father in 2005, the summer before she died.

Dont' take life for granted. Never hold back from saying to someone, "I love you."

My 81 year old father-in-law is in the hospital with the possibility of needing surgery for an obstructed gut. He's not in the best of health to begin with so this has me worried. Sure, he could pull through just fine! But I was a medic for six years - I have a tendancy to be realistic.

I told my husband to call his father and tell him, "I love you." I told him that you never know what is going to happen when anyone of any age is put on the operating table.

He told me I was being melodramatic.

Perhaps. But I think I've earned the right to be melodramatic. I carried my best friend Chris's coffin to his dark cold grave after the fire truck flipped on the ice and he was killed. I spent many sleepless nights mourning Dale who had dropped dead from a heart attack several weeks after asking me to marry him. (I hadn't said yes yet but I needed some time. Yet time isn't always on our side!) I spent many sleepless nights in the bunkroom of the firehouse staring at my hands and wondering why I was so highly trained and yet so incapable of saving that person in the car or in the house or ... And I've heard far too often the wail of a loved one, "I never had a chance to say 'I love you!'"

A few days before mom died she was hallucinating. I was sitting next to her on the sofa and "playing along." We were back in time in that two-story apartment we lived in before I left home. Over the course of the evening I must have said, "I love you, Mom" about 100 times. Each time she said, "I love you too, Shell." She was so far into her hallucinations that she never picked up on the fact that I was repeating myself every ten seconds. I said "I love you" to my mother until I could say it no more. I soaked in her every reply, "I love you too, Shell." I exhausted myself with "I love you, Mom" until I felt as if I could live the rest of my life and have enough, "I love you too, Shell" stored up in my heart to see me through.

A few days later she drew her last breath with me by her side. We were sitting eye-to-eye so that she would know she was not alone. I had heard the death rattle that morning and knew she was leaving. She couldn't speak any more but I could hear her voice ringing in my heart, "I love you too, Shell." As she took her last breath I heard her voice again and again, "I love you too, Shell." My step-father and I crowded close to her and shouted out as she died, "I LOVE YOU!! I LOVE YOU!! I LOVE YOU!!"

Mom wanted to be creamated so we did as she wished. But we couldn't afford any kind of urn. We had to burry her in a cheap cardboard box with her name scrawled across a paper lable in messy handwrighting, "Kathy McCoy." I was so angry that this beautiful woman, my mother, had to be burried in a flimsy cardboard box on a cold November day. But she had her wish: we burried her with her own mother who had died back in 1989. Mom lost her mother at the same age that I lost mine. We were both 30 years old when our mothers went away.

How ironic.

After we placed "mom" in that cold gaping hole I lay my favorite rosary across the lid of that horrid box and I whispered, "I love you, Mom."

In the echo of the wind I embraced her reply, "I love you too, Shell."

Don't ever take life for granted. Don't ever miss a single chance to say, "I love you."