In April 2016, Prince died at his Paisley Park home. This will be forever tied in my mind with my mom.
My mom was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer in December 2015. In January 2016, we got the test results back. It was triple negative which meant there were no drugs they could use to treat it. The doctor's recommendation was hospice. He predicted she had about six weeks to live. Mom only made it six days.
This was utterly devastating. I still miss her all the time. It's also why I'm adamant about women getting mammograms.
We're from Minneapolis, but my job transferred me to Atlanta and my parents were spending the winter with my when my mom died. My dad and I went back to Minnesota in April to start going through her things. The plan was that he'd live with me, so we needed to clean out the entire house. Going through Mom's things was emotionally devastating and so hard. We donated a lot of things and we had boxes and boxes of things to bring to Georgia. Too much to fit in my car.
A couple of days before we were going to drive back to Georgia, we were standing in line at UPS when I saw the news that Prince had died. Already emotionally tender, this was one more blow.
You see, Prince was a Minneapolis kid, too. I had some of his CDs, I saw him in concert. He was so talented and he'd stayed in Minnesota, creating Paisley Park not that far from where I lived. I'd grown up listening to his songs.
A few months ago, I listened to a podcast that talked a little bit about Prince's death and I teared up right away. For a moment, it puzzled me, and then I realized what I said at the beginning of this post. Prince's death is forever tied in my mind and my heart with saying goodbye to my mom as we sorted through her things.
