Vivian, V

Filling in more pieces of my mom’s life; there were times when we traveled out West to see my mom’s siblings and their families. I was in fourth grade when we first crossed the Rockies, my first sight of mountains. We saw Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone Park, the Grand Tetons, the Snake River Canyon, Multnomah Falls, the Portland Zoo, and the Pacific Ocean. We also went through Glacier Mountain Park. My mom was a trooper as we went on the old curvy mountain cliffside roads in a station wagon pulling a borrowed slide-up trailer. We made similar trips again, once in the winter, where we had to put chains on the tires so they would grab into the deep snow through the mountain passes in Montana and Idaho’s pan handle.
As I and my brothers became adults and young parents, Mom continued to work, sometimes coming home from a long day to a household full of young grandchildren.
At one point she found out she had breast cancer. At first the doctor thought the tumor or growth was benign. Test results showed cancer. My oldest son, Kyle, was a baby at the time. It seemed to help to see him during that time, and seeing me, her daughter, as a young mom. She survived the breast cancer 36 years now. I lived in Wisconsin, then Illinois, during those years, returning to Fargo the summer of 1980. By then I had two sons, eventually moving into a house, where my daughter first lived. Both brothers lived in North Dakota at that time so my mom saw much of her grandchildren. The cancer made her look closely at her “mortality.” She started to enjoy her love of rollerskating, again.
She met and married my stepdad, and neared retirement. She opened her heart to her father-in-law while he was living. After he passed on, she helped with home-care of her 92 year old mother-in-law. this, she did while she was still working full-time at the VA.