I was born in a time that no matter what you wanted, you followed your family's wishes and it didn't matter if your heart was broken in the process. So I was separated from my mother at the age of 3 months, given up for adoption and she was told to forget about this part of my her life.

Little did she know that the daughter she had given up had inherited her stubbornness and zest for life, and after 42 years I found her.

But before we were reunited, we had written to each other for over two years and financed AT&T's long distance company's expansion, lol. When we were finally reunited in July of 1990, I not only met my biological mother...I met my pen pal, telephone buddy and my BEST friend. It was the greatest day of my life.

We spent the next 12 years together, meeting the challenges of life and traveling every chance we got. We walked the Arizona desert, saw the oldest & largest trees on earth in California, strolled the Pacific Ocean coast line, drove to Copper Harbor, Michigan (top of the world ma!) and watched a hurricane come in on the coast of Texas.

 Every chance we got we went fishing. We even bought a boat so we could catch the BIG ones in the middle of the lake. I finally gave up and admitted that she was the BEST fisherman I had ever met (but I did make her pay me a dollar for saying that, lol)

The last year of her life was hard for her.

I knew, from 6 months after I found her that mom had major health problems that someday would take her life, but we had hoped that we had at least 20 or 30 years to worry about it. Sad to say we only had 11 years before reality began to sink in and we both knew she would be leaving me and going home to Heaven and Our Lord. As time passed and the hospital visits came closer and closer together, she made the decision that she didn't want to go into a hospital again.

On December 12, 2002 we had our first visit with VisaCare Hospice. We could not have asked for nicer, more loving compassionate people to help mom and our family. Every one of the people with that agency went above and beyond what we expected and made her last days very comfortable and pain free. God bless them all.

My dear mom and best friend left the body that had betrayed her and went home to Our Lord New Year's Eve 2002, after taking a deep sigh, while I knelt beside her telling her for the last time how much I loved her.

If you would like to visit more memorial pages for our dear mother, grandmother and great grandmother, please visit the pages below. Through them you will see just how much this special woman touched so many lives and left behind memories that will always keep her with us in our hearts.