I am sad to report the passing of my dear mother, Edith Marie Zentz, on October 21, 2011. She had been ill for so long with a spot on her left lung. It was inoperable due to the position of the spot and also due to her advanced age(88). The doctor told her she would not make it off the table. So, they decided to just watch it, having her get a cat scan every six months. On her last scan two months before her demise, the scan showed the spot had grow significantly and looked like a bunch of straw lapping over one another. Still, the doctors did not declare it cancer. They freely admitted they had not seen such a thing before and did not know exactly what it could be. But, they said it definitely was not cancer. So, what was it that was spreading over my mother's lung and literally choking her to death? I told mother that she was a "unique mystery." She seemed to agree and told many of her friends that she was a mystery to her doctors. They all shook their heads, made a negative remark about doctors today and said they'd pray for her, which I'm sure they did.

The last two months of her life I took total control in taking care of her. I saw to her every whim. If she wanted certain foods to eat, I cooked them for her. She was particularly fond of cornbread and buttermilk with slivers of raw onion mixed in the bowl. I loved it also. We ate a great deal of it growing up in Dundalk, Md. We were actually born and raised in the south, so that accounts for our down to earth tastes. Mother also like beans---any kind; white, pinto, kidney, navy. She liked them with cornbread or hoecake (a southern fried white batter bread made in a skillet or baked in the oven in a heavy skillet. It's origin was American Indian). She also loved tomato gravy over biscuits or hoecake. She enjoyed chipped beef and gravy over biscuits too. Mom was a southern girl through and through. The last few weeks of her life she found it hard to feed herself. Her depth perception was off and she had a difficult time reaching her mouth with the spoon. I helped her guide the spoon to her open mouth without saying anything so as not to embarrass her. It wasn't long after that she stopped eating and drinking.

It was hard watching mother's deterioration from day to day. Eventually she could not stand up without her knees giving way. I had been helping her at least four or five times a day to go from her lounge chair in the living room to her bed in the next room. She needed to take frequent naps and to ease the pain in her back from sitting so much, she had to lie down and go to sleep, even for an hour.

I noticed that it was more difficult and took longer to get her from the bed to her wheelchair, then into the living room and transferred into her lounge chair. This process took almost two hours one day. Finally, one weekend about three weeks before she died, I had to tell her she couldn't get out of bed any more. "Why?," she said. I told her she couldn't stand on her own two feet and that if she fell, I could not pick her up. I was still ten pounds lighter than she was even though she had lost about thirty pounds and was now 120 pounds. I had a rotator cuff problem as well as a weak left wrist and thumb problem. It was impossible for me to lift her without assistance. I explained all this to mom so she lay in bed and stopped conversing with me except if she needed something. I felt she had put up a barrier between us now and this hurt me very deeply. I hugged and kissed her many times a day and told her how much I loved her. She used to say in return, "I love you very, very, very, very much." My come-back was, "I love you a hundred times more than that." So, when she stopped talking to me, it broke my heart.

The last two weeks of her life were very hard for me. My three sisters came up every couple days to see her and sit with her for a while. She talked to them very haltingly. She couldn't seem to focus on anything so when she talked, she seemed very confused. Finally, on October 21, 2011, at 3:50p.m., she took her last breath. I was numb. My daughter, Marie and I had been up all night on "death watch", because the nurse said it could be any moment. We spent the long night going through the boxes and many albums of pictures, choosing about 150 photographs for the slide show the funeral homes liked to make of the deceased to show those at the viewings.

I looked at my wonderful, loving mother, laying cold and yellow-gray in the bed. Her eyes were closed but her mouth remained open. I tried to close it but rigor had already begun to sink in to her body. I called the hospice care nurse and she came to verify mother's death. She called the funeral home to come pick up her body. It was then that I broke down a little. I already missed my mother. I began missing her when she stopped talking to me. I knew she was in a different world already, half-way between two worlds, as it were. Oh, if only I could go with her to see that she got safely to her destination. I needn't have concerned myself though, for I knew that God's angels were there to escort her "home" to God and our savior, Jesus. I would miss her for the rest of my life. I love you, Mother. I miss you so much. Please watch and wait for me for I'll be coming to join you sooner or later, whatever is God's will for me.