She is 75 years old today.  

The average life expectancy for an American is currently 77.6 years; for the average white female the figure is 80.5 years. That's good news.  It means she's not living on borrowed time yet and I've got at least five and half years left.  Of course I also had all those other years but I wasn't thinking then the way I'm thinking now.

Then again, things happen.  Every day, they happen.  Five and a half years could end up being five and a half minutes.  You just never know.

When my mother Donna was born on this day in 1936, there was no such thing as a NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit), where she'd undoubtedly have wound up. At two pounds, there wasn't much to her physically.  Her twin brother died a few days later.  She hung on.

There's still not much to her. She's frail and thin but she's got the energy of someone half her age.  So that's good. She's still hanging on.  Still, the years are mounting.

Earlier this year, she nearly died.  I remember watching her as she lay comatose in the ICU, battling an infection that raged through her body.   Then she developed sepsis and pneumonia.  Every day was a crazy game of numbers, some up, others down, as doctor after doctor gave me, my sister and my father an uncertain prognosis in medical terms that none of us paid much attention to or understood.  The bottom line was, at her age and with those problems, we should probably expect the worst.  

But since she'd never expected the worst, none of us had either. We weren't prepared for that possibility.  She was always the one who took charge of these things.  She set the expectation.  She should be telling us what to expect, not the other way around.

She hung on.  Pulled through.  Came home.  And got better.

All those months when she was sick and unrecognizable, hooked up to tubes and machines, I asked myself why I hadn't paid more attention to her given all the time I'd had with her.  Why hadn't I studied her harder instead of being content with standing next to her fire.

Being so positive, expecting the best from people, believing everyone had some good in them.  It seemed such a trite and naive viewpoint especially when I was a teenager and young adult, only able to focus on myself.  Yet people gravitated toward her, even my friends.  Even strangers. 

When I was younger, she sometimes embarrassed me.  Like the time in the crowded doctor's waiting room, when a mentally disabled girl was talking loudly to no one in particular and people started to move away. Including me. My mother got out of her chair, sat herself next to the girl and carried on an animated conversation with her until the doctor called us in.

I watched, mortified,  from across the room as the two of them chatted like they'd know each other for years. I saw the look on the girl's own mother's face. She was glowing like a light bulb.

Donna's always had an intuitive way of knowing when a person needs help, big or little.   She's never been one to agonize over how it might look or who should do what and how much.  She just jumps right in and doesn't care if her hands get dirty.

Friends, neighbors, relatives, strangers.  No one's ever had to ask her to help but if they did, they knew what the answer would be.   

After years of her taking care of my grandfather around the clock when he developed Alzheimer's, my father became critically ill with respiratory problems not long after the old man died.  Donna got right on it without missing a beat.  

She was older, and tired more easily but she never complained. 

My dad eventually recovered and they moved from Cleveland to Columbus, to be near my family.  She loved her grandchildren more than anything in the world and wanted to spend as much time as possible with them.  She was looking forward to relaxing.  Having some fun with us.  For years it had been work work work and now it was time to play.  

They could have retired to someplace warm but that wasn't her style.  I wondered why. That would have been my style.  I was pretty sure I'd feel like it was high time to start thinking about myself.  

Seven months after they moved, my husband died.  She thought of him as her son and the blow was severe but there would be no down time for Donna.  I'd just had a baby and there were three other kids as well.  Kids who needed someone they could count on.  A daughter who needed someone she could count on.  She stepped in as usual, without asking, and did her thing.  She hasn't stopped since.

I'd sometimes catch her looking at Keith's picture and crying.  I'd curse him and curse God and tell her to stop.  "How can you cry," I'd say, "how can you cry after what he's done to us.  All of us.  There goes your retirement thanks to him."  

She told me to shut up.  She told me God waited on Keith until my father was better and they'd been able to move.  She said Keith had waited too; that he knew he could count on her.

I told her she was a stupid old woman but maybe there was some truth to what she said.  After all, she understood both of them better than I did.  

She understands a lot of things better than I do and after all these years, I thought some of what she knows would have transferred to me.  But she's made it look so effortless that it's been easier just to stand back and watch her. 

These days I am watching her closely, hoping to make up for lost time.

When Keith died, I often asked myself how I was going to figure out a different way to live.  But when I looked at my mother all those times in the ICU, I asked myself a different question.  I asked myself how I was going to live if she died. Fortunately she didn't.  But she's 75 years old today and even though she seems like she has the energy of someone half her age, and even though I'm going to sing her happy birthday and celebrate her life, I'm also going to be praying hard for those five and a half years.  And many more.