Heartfelt Tips For Life And Living

By Todd Daigneault

Physical and mental health tips for optimized well-being. As well as spiritual health tips for optimized spiritual well-being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Todd Daigneault
• Release date: Nov 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452338316

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Heartfelt Tips For Life

And Living

Todd Daigneault

Smashwords Edition

(c) 2014 Todd Daigneault

Reflections: People we miss

I miss the mother I knew so well; and the father I never knew. My father was cut down in the prime of his life (at 24), in a horrible train accident. My mother, a very strong woman, was pregnant with me, (her third child). My mother went on to have a varied life, a near brush with death from cancer the first time in the 1960s, and several cheating/abusing husbands. Our family (now including a sister) from a second marriage was by no means wealthy, but we were bonded to each other, especially our little spitfire of a mom. A woman, who stood a couple inches past five feet, and towered throughout her life with her own personal achievements and a huge zest for life. My mom was a very pragmatic woman-never allowing pie in the sky dreams to overwhelm her. Nevertheless, she accomplished many great things in her life, in her own way, standards and ideals. She just saw herself as a hardworking single mom, raising her children and living her life.

She ultimately succumbed from stage IV lung cancer, during a horrible heatwave in the summer of 2009, leaving a legacy of children and grandchildren, as well as innumerable friends, and a still grieving sister-in-law from her marriage to my father. They stayed very close to each other, through the decades that followed my father's death. I miss my mom to this day, for she exemplified courage and strength all her life, inspiring me to run marathons and do other things that people may find impossible, or very hard to accomplish. Stripped of a father while I was still nestled lovingly in my mother's womb-my mother became both mother and father. She will never be forgotten for her lifetime courage and valor, as a single mom, as a woman climbing up the job ladder in eras when women were just starting to emerge.

As her son, I came to visit her when she was recuperating from her lung cancer operation, way back in 2003. Her face lit up when she saw a familiar face, her boy, come and visit her in the hospital. My mother's wisdom and strength seemed to have been genetically passed to me. It would play a more important role as the lung cancer returned with a vengeance in 2006. This would be the final and most important battle in her life, and my mom, our hero, would wage it ferociously until she finally could not fight anymore. As her oxygen levels began to diminish, she did the most courageous thing anybody could-she accepted death-and finally passed away almost three years to the day after her diagnosis.

She went with dignity and the love that she felt for all of us...as we felt for her. My father, who was without his wife for decades, was finally re-united in a tearful embrace. I will always miss mom...and the father I never knew. In the decades since my father passed, in late 1964, my mother went on to live an incredible life. She missed her husband very much