Kate: Five

My father is a fantastic artist. One of my brothers is a technical genius. Another brother has the strongest will-power of anyone I've met, while my mother is outrageously kind. I am not any of these things, but I admire them all.

When I start thinking about all the other things my family is - crazy, embarrassing, irrational, emotional - it's not surprising that I've rarely stopped to consider all the things that make them amazing. I don't often appreciate my family for what they offer because I'm too often focusing on what they lack.

Along with being incredibly kind, my mother has colon cancer. She's facing it head on and I admire her greatly for it. She was diagnosed late this spring and went from an active happy life to a near-death experience in two short days. Her cancer, it seems, was not caught early, which is, in short, a bummer as it's very curable in the early stages. My mom is no stranger to poor health. She's already faced other cancers, heart problems, a quadruple bi-pass, diabetes and glaucoma - she literally is a walking catalog of medical maladies. I have been summoned to the hospital to say farewell to her on three separate occasions. Yet she has lived through them all, recovering with a calmness of spirit that astounds me. If asked, she will tell you it's because her faith in God is absolute.

When I hear this I want to shake my fist and gnash my teeth. Despite all the different ways my mom has shown me the path to God over the years, I've never managed to actually knock on his door. Instead I rail and curse and wonder why her loving God puts her though crushing illness, bringing her to the brink of death before allowing her to live. How could he do that to her? That's not love. She calmly points out that he carries her back every time and if that's not love, then what is?

I am not convinced. I don't like watching her go through this and can't contemplate a world without her. Selfish to the core, I know that when my mother dies, so dies the very first and last person on earth who ever really, truly, deep down knew me to my blackest, yuckiest place and still thought I was amazing. I'm not ready to live without her and I told her so this weekend as we talked about death and what comes next. Typically she is at peace while I am a crying, sobbing mess. Part of her calmness comes from the fact that she knows she would be going to see people she loved, lost and misses. She's positive that in the next world they'll be no word for cancer . In that life she'll be able to vacation in Paris as long as she likes and eat Krispy Kreme donuts every day without gaining an ounce . She makes heaven sound like an all-inclusive adult disneyland and, still, I am unmoved.

Halfway through our conversation she stopped to empty the bag that now functions as her makeshift-portable bathroom. She does this with the slight exasperation of someone having to retie an unruly shoelace instead of a complicated, multi-step process that she'll have to repeat many times a day for the rest of her days. This procedure would have me complaining from the moment I opened my eyes in the morning until my head hit the pillow again at night. The gulf between our attitudes never seemed so great to me as at that moment and I asked her how she could love the God that did this to her. More to the point, how could she love the God that would take her away when he knew how much I needed her?

She held my hand and asked me, "Haven't you noticed that God gave you five moms this year? Just when you think you might be without a mom, he provided you with a bunch of them. How can you doubt that he loves you?"

And, of course, she's right. Like a miracle I've been surrounded by five women who are kind, generous, loving, supportive, caring and fantastic. It's now no coincidence to me that we're called the Mama's. I've always known that no person could ever replace my mother.

God knows, it takes five.