MarinaAndHerHeartOfSteel

This is the story of my mother but it is also mine. Marina was born in 1954 in Duluth Minnesota. She grew up there and was part of a family that had immigrated from Greece. She talked about her grandparents a lot and the cooking and family time. As a child she had meningitis and it left her deaf in one ear and with other issues and she had to learn to walk again as well. Well she survived that only to lose the rest of her hearing to Ménière's disease at 18. She somehow managed to regain herself after that and kept on. My mother had me at almost 28 and was a single parent. I'm not saying things were easy but we managed and we survived. Growing up we were always tight on money and she often times enjoyed making these dresses to put me in for church. Man they were hideous. We very had opposition on taste in clothes. We struggled but I never went without. My grandma lived with us until she passed in 198&. That was difficult, my mom had a lot on her plate. Then there was a rift  in the family and pretty much we were on our own. I remember we had a huge garden and I got grounded so many times for eating the veggies off the plants. Following the death of my aunt in 1992, she started to change. Withdraw. She ended up having a depressive episode that was months long and left me to care for the home, her and myself. I don't remember much until she put me with some friends from church, and that was that. I don't know how long after she started to seem better, more energetic, eventually I moved home again. She was back to grooming dogs again, and life returned to normal. She went to every one of my games. Softball, volleyball, basketball. Only time she missed was if it was emergent. Same with band and choir even though she couldn't hear them. She sent me to camp every summer and in the adult hindsight, she gave me a vacation for the interpreting job she awarded me as soon as I could communicate lol. Crap vacation hours. Anyway, she was always there unless she couldn't be and that taught me to be diligent and how to show up. You show up for the people you love. The people you are invested in. We moved to the iron range when I was pregnant with my second child in 2003. She was a Minnesota born and bred woman and that's where her heart stayed. She put up with more crap than needed and she never turned her back on us. As I followed my life she was always with me partly because I'd always been her interpreter I guess. She also had this wicked sense of humor and amazing timing with the most inappropriate comments lol. We moved to Fargo about five years ago and spent hours together because she'd had at least one major heart attack and she had ten stents in her heart. And her critters man she loved them. So much. Her best friend was her cat Mitch who is curled up on my bed right now. Her dog Jonah, or knucklehead as she often called him would growl at her when she would yell at him and the louder she would be the more he'd yell back. God j would just laugh because she was a small woman and he is a big dog. Right now I am struggling to come up with expenses to cover arrangements that will honor her last wishes and give her what she wanted. I am desperately in need of help because I also am left with pets and other things very unexpectedly. My mom passed away in our apartment with my dogs and hers around her and her beloved best friend Mitch was with her as well. On September 15th, my 41rst birthday, and I was in jail clearing up an old legal matter I was informed of her passing. In that moment my entire life changed. My mother is gone and I'd never come home to her not being here, my family has flown apart because my older daughter is the one who found her grandma, and I am scrambling to cover the expenses so we can bury my mother and have her funeral. Along with it also trying to figure out how to care for her pets because she wanted me to keep them which means keeping a roof over our heads that I'm at this moment not sure I can. I've done everything I can do without being able to get there because I sent her back home like she wanted and now we are separated and the family scattered really so I've been doing what I could just by trying to overcome roadblocks and the overwhelming sense of being totally alone for the first time in my life. And I just really wish I could ask her what to do next. I know my mother didn't overcome what she did so I could give up. Having been left alone in my apartment has taught me more than I thought possible this last week. Right now my only priority is doing for my mother and doing right by her. So I'm going to do everything in my power to give her the send off she deserved and somehow get the bells to ring that she missed so much since she can hear them again.