Bittersweet Anniversary

I know I haven't updated this blog like I should have and this particular post should have gone up a month ago. Meanwhile...

On January 26, 2004, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, my father had been stationed in Kuwait as part of Operation Enduring Freedom for almost a year. While safer than Iraq, he was still in a war zone and we had had a tense year of it. His time was almost up, but his unit had not received a definite out-of-country date yet. We knew it could theoretically be any day, but every day still over there was another day of worry for all of us back home. Sitting on our couch, hearing my mom say cancer, still afraid for my dad, was a shattering experience.

Events proceeded quickly (at my mother's request and with my dad's approval) and Mom actually had a lumpectomy two days after her diagnosis, with no definite plans for my dad to come home early. Before the surgery, the doctors had been fairly (key word) confident that the cancer cells had not spread to her lymph nodes and were considering radiation without chemotherapy as a possibility for treatment. Tests performed immediately prior to and during surgery dashed that hope - cancer cells were found in three lymph nodes and chemo was now required.

At this point, we decided to get Dad home sooner rather than later. Men aren't always the best of nurses, so that wasn't the reason why, but Mom needed her husband, we kids needed our Daddy, and all of us needed the peace of mind of knowing he was safe while we dealt with this fresh crisis. The Red Cross is the go-to organization when you need to get an overseas military family member home in a family emergency, and they really stepped up to the plate. Dad flew in to Mobile Regional Airport (MRA) on February 1, 2004, just four days after Mom's surgery.

Since 9/11 visitors can't go all the way down to the gate at MRA anymore to meet incoming planes (or watch outgoing ones for that matter), so we had to wait up at the main lobby. The welcoming party we had there to greet him was nothing compared to what we had been planning before all this with Mom came up, but there are few feelings in the world like seeing him walk down that concourse, coming home for good (he had been home on leave back in December, but that's another story). He was dressed in civvies and carrying a dozen yellow roses - Mom's favorite flower. The picture above is their reunion at the airport.

Mom and I were talking just the other day about how hard it is to believe that it has been two years since that diagnosis. An awful lot has happened around us and to us in those two years, and I'll be getting to that later. But for now, I just wanted to remember how I felt two years ago, first sitting on our couch and, a week later, standing at the airport. Two years later, my mother is cancer free and my father is retired from the National Guard, but all I have to do is look at this picture and I can relive two of the scariest years of my life - the one that ended for my dad and began for my mom.