Oh Merry I am so so sorry. Many heart hugs to you & your family.
My mom has been unresponsive and dying two weeks as of today. I am waiting for the call...
Keeping busy with this new hobby, and spending money like a madwoman is keeping me distracted.
Oh honey! *warm ehugs* I'm so sorry...but I'm glad you have vaping to focus on! I do not know your mom's situation, but I wish both of you comforting dreams of happy times, until that call comes. It is so hard wanting for there to be something you can do for your loved one, when reality may be all you can do is pray for a gentle passing.
I don't know what I would have done without my vape gear. I even built a commemorative dual coil (my very first sleeper coil!) on the road today while hubby took a quick turn at the wheel, then vaped joyfully for Dad's release from the fear and confusion he's had as his mind slipped completely away. He lost his sight a few years ago, and most of his hearing, so the darkness and silence contributed to his decline.
Perhaps I can share a bit with you, keepsmiling, of how good things wait for you to remember, of someone who has just left this world...
Born 12 years after my nearest sibling, I grew up something of an only child to older parents. My Dad was a teacher, and everything we did together was something wonderful about the world and the natural things in it.
From tide pooling, (when I was 8, we spent the summer at Albion, getting up before dawn to tide-pool dive or ride the waves in a dinghy catching Velella (sailfin jellyfish) for the school's tanks) to all the wonders of the Arizona desert, to rock hounding, fossil hunting, hiking in national forests...he showed me Old Faithful, we fed chipmonks together at Yosemite and watched them make off with our lunch when our backs were turned. When I was 3 years old, we stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon together, and watched people ride donkeys down the twisting switchback trails through his binoculars.
As a toddler, he put me up on the back of a trail horse at the summer camp he and Mom worked at between school sessions that year, since daycare was unheard of in the early 1960's. I spent that summer, and the 2 after it, at that camp in the Sierras, sitting on that same pinto mare Cheyanne. She loved me, and tolerated no one else. I rode hundreds of miles in the course of that time, with the campers on gentler less cantankarous mounts, up and down the beautiful wooded hills. When I was ten and had earned enough money for my own horse, he had my back the day I walked in with the phone number of a cattle rancher who had a home to rent where my dream could begin to come true.
Everyone thought he was crazy when he built a sailboat in the basement of the small school he was principal for. "How will you get it OUT?" everyone asked. Wood shop, math, and geometry lessons went into that boat, and into the neat ramp he built down to the new double doors in the basement, from which his sailboat, the Velella, eventually emerged.
We were never far above poverty level, but Dad and Mom gave me something far more important than growing up well-to-do. They taught me that anything can make you happy, if you will let it. You can make something of yourself if you learn how, and the only thing holding you back from that, is not being willing to learn.
They taught me to read by the time I was 4, so that I'd be no problem on the long drives to summer adventures. I read the entire town library in under a year when Dad helped me get my first library card to celebrate my buying my first horse. I would lie, face down, on Star's broad back, my book propped on his rump, while he cropped grass, waiting together for Dad to come home in the afternoon. The librarian would just smile when I came back, tiny behind the big stack of books in my arms, for another mind expansion fix.
Dad loved wood carving, and his tool shop was hallowed ground to me. The well-oiled scents of the secret recesses, where each hand tool was always in its place, called out to me for exploration. I was always a tomboy, but Dad managed to save me from my curiosity while teaching me how to treasure the feel of tools in hand, and the joy of something well made. After he retired from teaching, Dad and Mom started a hand-carved wooden doll business.
Many band-aids and much bloodshed later, they even progressed to a massive pantograph carver for roughing out the blanks for their dolls. These were finished by hand, with basic shapes removed by the spinning drill bits to either side of the guide which was run over the base blank form. Jolly, (who truly was a green giant of a machine) was a family member for many years.
When I think of him today, it is different than yesterday before he passed. I look up at the stars, and remember how he loved them so deeply. All the sunrises, all the sunsets, that we watched together. All the beauty in the world he taught me to love because he loved nature so very much. I hear the call of chipmonks, the song of every bird he ever taught me to spot and whistle along with, I smell sea air and mountain evergreens, I feel the desert wind on my cheeks and in my hair, and his hand on my shoulder.
My Dad.
The best advice I have, is remember everything wonderful about your Mom. Name it, hug it in your heart, and let it reawaken everything wonderful you ever shared together. Open yourself to the good memories, let them in. This will keep you safe, while you wait for that call. And after, I hope.
......AND, they didn't want my only star be on my bathroom door! 
Maybe why the very old like to sleep a lot. 
