Want to live & Love family

Hey, everyone.

I was just doing laundry and I looked over and saw my mom's "joy box." It's a colorful pink box with foam letters spelling out "RoAnne's Joy Box" on the side. The joy box is what we stored all of the letters mom got from people during the two years she was fighting cancer.

I'd never really glanced at it too much, because it was full of letters and those tend to say the same thing. Maybe not. I'm going to investigate them. My mom is gone, and I don't think she'd mind anyway if I did read through some of them. Maybe I'll be able to pick up a story or two.

But anyway, there's a drawing of flowers in the box that I'd kind of glanced over every time I saw it. However, today I noticed it said "I love sunshine" in scribbly blue letters. I then realized it was my mom's handwriting. I pulled the poster out of the box and saw it for what it really was.

My mom drew a picture of flowers in a box and around the outside of the flowers are the phrases:

"I love sunshine"
"Want to live & Love family"
"Keeep going & praying"
"Life is good"
"unconditional Love"
"Sisters" with a heart drawn next to it, leading me to believe she drew this with Aunt Jane.
"Cancer sucks & is scary"
"Flowers are awesome"

I could tell she wrote this when she was getting radiation to the brain, because her handwriting was shaky, and some words were messed up, but it was her handwriting. And in her handwriting she had written that she wanted to live. These words echoed for me as a reminder of when last summer I was sitting on the porch with her and she told me that all she wanted was "more time with her kids."

Mom wanted to live so bad. Mom wanted to live and love family, and I really wanted that too. I, of course, started crying. Even now I can't exactly stop. It's been hard being home without her. I'm throwing a lot of my stuff away and getting ready to move to Japan. I feel like I can make a somewhat new start over there, but just because you go overseas, doesn't mean your problems disappear. I just miss her so much. I miss her every day. It's hard to believe that in 17 days it will be 6 months since she passed. I want to see her so badly, but I can't and it hurts so bad.

I wish the flower drawing had come true.