I have never really cared for stories about the sick and dying. I've never found the subject appealing. In fact, I'd rather avoid the whole thing until that moment when it becomes unavoidable. My mother was a farm kid. The second of six. She grew up in eastern Montana on the banks of the Missouri River. She lived an abandoned life as a child she once told me, lost in the middle of six kids while cooking for farm hands- helping to scratch a living out of the dirt. The Great Depression was fresh in the minds of the folks back then and they lived a frugal existence, barely making ends meet and wasting nothing. She tried to fix or repair everything that broke. Her harvest gold washer and dryer will testify to that. That was how my mother lived her life. So about the time my father first showed an interest in my mother, the sparks flew right away. Mother would later tell me that my father was the only person that showed genuine interest in her at that insecure time of her life. ...