HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY
Mother's Day is this Sunday. If you haven't gotten a card and a gift, you may want to get on that. I have always viewed Mother's Day as a time to get together with all of those people in our lives who fulfill the mother's role. Our grandmothers, our mothers, the mother of our children, those of our chidren who are the mothers of our own grandchildren, and those other people in our lives who filled that role unofficially by being a mentor or friend. This year, however, I am reminded about how many of those people are no longer around to spend time with. Many of us here in Smoky Hill Rotary have lost our mothers in the last few years. My mother and Donita's mother both died within the last 2 years, our fathers a few years before. It leaves a void that is hard to express. I remember in the early stages of the adjustment to the loss, having something happen and thinking, "I need to tell mom about that" before remembering that was no longer possible, and a deep, renewed sense of loss would come over me. Those moments don't happen much anymore. Someone once wrote that he interviewed his grandmother for part of a research paper he was working on for a Psychology class. When he asked her to define success in her own words, she said, "Success is when you look back at your life and the memories make you smile." By that standard, my mother and mother-in-law both had successful lives. Remembering them on Mother's Day will make me smile a lot.