avastin & insurance bill

nancy591 said:

mom
How old were you when your Mom died? I have a GREAT interest in children who grew up without a Mom. I need validation the kids will be alright!!

Nancy... my mother lived to
Nancy... my mother lived to see me grown, but my stepmother's mom died when she was a small child, and her dad never remarried. She grew up to be a wonderful mom, a good Christian woman, and an amazing cook. There were two girls, only a couple of years apart in age. Her sister and she remained unusually close throughout their lives. Her sister's nickname was "Happy", because she was always such a happy child.

When I was growing up, there was a boy named Jon in my neighborhood whose mom had died before I met him, so he was under the age of 10 when his mom died. If his dad ever remarried, it was after we graduated from high school. Jon was the envy of every kid in the neighborhood. His dad doted on him. Jon's first car was a Corvette (not a new one, but still.....a CORVETTE.) Jon was an only child, but he was allowed to have friends sleep over on school nights. He wasn't obnoxious, though. His dad was pretty strict about manners and rules and stuff. I never heard of Jon getting into any kind of trouble. I can't remember if he went to college or not, but he made decent grades in high school - not honor roll grades, but decent ones.

And finally, I have a good friend, whom I met in a support group for widowed persons about 12 years ago. At the time he had a 5 year old (boy) and a 10 year old (girl). His wife went in for a routine gall bladder removal, had a stroke on the table, and died after several days (and many strokes later). She was 35 years old. Those kids are doing great. The daughter graduated from college last Spring and the boy is in high school and has his heart set on a military or law enforcement career. Their dad never remarried, either. There was another couple in the group who got married and combined families totaling 5 kids. The youngest was under two when his mom died. I don't keep in touch with them, but a mutual friend (whose wife died and left him to raise two boys) does, and he told me not long ago that he had heard from Pam, and they were all doing fine.

My good friend Rob (the mutual friend in the preceeding paragraph) remarried when his sons were older - around 17 and 20. Prior to that, it was just the three guys. It was a bit odd to visit them at first, because they never changed the mom's color scheme (lots of mauve), and her collection of those little angel figurines (I forget the name of them) was everywhere, even years after she died (of gastric cancer). They liked it that way, though. Rob told me that all the milestones were bittersweet: the boys' graduations, their weddings, and the birth recently of his first grandchild. At both their weddings, when the bride handed her mom a rose, she also placed one on a seat that had been left empty, in memory of the boys' mother.

Even my friend whose mom took her own life turned out alright, though she had a harder time dealing with it emotionally. Maybe because she was older (middle school), or maybe because of the circumstances.



Carlene