caregiver | anntogether

I don’t often show post-stroke images of my beautiful mom. I share the image (below) to share Millie’s joy.

Through three years of relentless pain, Millie smiled and expressed joy. Knowing her was a gift, and her lessons of love🌹 remain with me.

As her Halloween Birthday arrives, I will smile impossibly wide to pay Millie’s gift forward in a world that needs a hell of a lot more love

I wish you all a fun, fabulous, creative, smiling, and safe👻Happy Halloween!
am:)

(image below taken many harvest moons ago when Millie and Billy were cruisin’ around in their convertible Mustang GT, and my kiddies were not yet costing us college money😁)

This post was inspired by a ‘new’ image.

It’s a wonderful gift to receive an image you’ve never seen before of a person you’ll not see again (in this version of life). My mom’s cousin had recently sent me a batch of family photos, a few of the images I’d not seen before – what a treasure to see my mom’s pearlescent smile in a ‘new’ way. I merged Millie’s image into the rainbow photo shown.

The rainbow happened on a most horrible day — a day not blackened by the dark weather but by my words. It was the day I told my sweet mother I was sending her to a nursing home. And that beautiful woman had the gall to smile, to tell me she understood and that everything would be okay.

The weight of my heart forced my tears forward like the storm. Then not long afterward, the rain stopped, the storm clouds moved on their way, and there outside, arcing over my house, was the most complete and perfect rainbow I’d ever seen. It was Millie’s Rainbow.

Thank you,
AnnMarie❤️