Multiple March Memories

My family tries to avoid making any major decisions during the month of March. It’s bad enough that it is the natal time of the year for me, but there are those miserable memories that have become anniversaries I’d rather forget. Yes, March is the month in which I was born. That birthday will soon be here where seventy-three years of my life are behind me. I’m not afraid like some people are in telling my age. There are reasons that I look the way I do and I don’t try to hide it with face lifts or tummy tucks.

Nearly twenty years ago, my wife Cindy Morrison Beck passed away with ovarian cancer. That is a difficult anniversary to deal with, but I know that she is now in a much better place. Ovarian cancer is a silent killer and it certainly was with Cindy. She had no pain. When she developed hoarseness and a cough, we thought was a severe upper respiratory tract infection. I finally forced her to seek treatment at a hospital. It was too late. Cancer filled her body and ten days later, she was gone. When I tell people it was a blessing, they think I am uncaring, but she was filled with cancer and had no pain, passing quickly in the end.

Fast forward three years. My mother Sybil Miner Beck had been suffering from the disease called Alzheimer’s. It is another slowly advancing disease that steals a person’s life. It steals memories. It robs the person of the ability to think clearly. It leaves only the physical shell of what the human being was. Mom died on the third anniversary of Cindy’s death, the very same day

I tested positive for the Corona virus while I was hospitalized because of a urinary tract infection and low potassium. On the routine follow-up visit with my family doctor, I had several tests done that showed my heart needed attention. I failed my stress test miserably. I lasted three minutes and forty seconds. I went for a cardiac catheterization that revealed I needed more than stent insertions, so March 8^th I went under the knife, had my sternum split, my ribs spread, and three vessels to my heart replaced.

That month of the year has arrived. I wonder what memory will be made this year.