Today would have been my mother-in-law’s 80th birthday. Preston was in Colorado Springs on business on October 6th having lunch with people he had just met when he got the call from Los Angeles that his mother had died suddenly. He called me immediately and I was in a state of total disbelief. Betty was someone you were certain would live well into her 90’s. But God had a different plan.
I only knew her for a few short years, but the lessons I took from watching her live her life will stay with me for a long time. At age 60, when the rest of us are thinking about retirement, she started a new career at an estate planning law firm as a personal secretary for one of the partners. She worked full time, a 40-hour work week Monday – Thursday… not because she had to, but because she wanted to. She ran circles around the younger girls and the attorney who spoke at her funeral said they’d have to hire 3 people to replace all that she did at the firm. Her work ethic was amazing.
But she still made time for lots of fun. She loved to come visit us on the farm and was eager to try anything new. She was here for 2 weeks in June. She saw lambs being born, saw her son milk a ewe, was here when our new llama arrived and helped us bale hay and even drove the tractor pulling the wagon full of hay when we were trying to get it in before the rain came. She had so much fun. She was my drinking buddy. She’d always say “Its 5 o’clock somewhere” and mix up a Manhattan while we made dinner.
She was a very active Red Hatter and went on several trips each year with her good friend Alice. In September of this year, she and Alice planned to go to Washington DC. Although they went with the group, the two of them always extended the trip to get in a little more site-seeing. A few weeks before the trip, Alice became too sick to travel, but Betty made the decision to go anyway. She navigated the nation’s capital, the Metro and did the tourist thing all on her own. What a brave woman!
Every weekend she would write us a letter. It usually talked about the weeding she would do in her rose gardens, the beautiful tomatoes she’d have year-round, the goldfish in her pond and errands around town. She’d include articles of interest from the newspaper to include maybe a letter to the editor she had written under the pseudonym Mary Johnson. And she always sent me a stack of coupons.
She wrote a letter to us that first weekend in October, put it in the mailbox Monday morning and went to work, feeling fine all day according to her co-workers. At the end of the day, she gave them a cheery good-bye – see you tomorrow. She stopped at the grocery store on the way home to pick up a few things and apparently on the way home started to feel badly. She pulled in the garage and ran in the house, sat down on a chair and that’s where the fire department found her the next morning. A neighbor saw that her garage was open and called the police.
In her reviews at work each year, she’d always ask what she needed to do to keep her job. She said she wanted to go with her boots on. That she did.
She loved reading my blog. She said on several occasions that she felt like I was writing a letter just to her and not to burst her bubble by telling her any differently. I even found copies of some of my stories she had saved on her computer. So since her death, I hadn’t felt very inspired to write. But today, in honor of her birthday, the inspiration returned. Cheers, Betty! Here’s to you and your amazing life. I will miss my drinking buddy.
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