If you do not enjoy a moment, you lose it forever. If you enjoy it, it is yours forever.
~Debasish Mridha

We were gathered at the kitchen table as we did every afternoon when we got home from school. Matt had just started first grade, Mike had started sixth, and I had started freshman year of high school. My mother, who always sat with us, rolled up to the table, my grandmother pushing her.

“Mom, I colored in school today!” exclaimed Matt, dumping his colored pencils from his backpack onto the table.

“Matt, that’s great. What did you color? Let me see what you did.” My mother squinted her eyes through her thick glasses as Matt held up his artwork. She brought the artwork close to her face.

“This is great. So beautiful!” she said, and Matt beamed. “Hey, we should all color. Matt, tear us out some pages from that book.”

He did so and placed one in front of each of us. My mother was given a coloring page with fairies. She asked my grandmother to roll her closer to the table and reached to pick out a pencil.

I was fourteen and it seemed a bit childish to sit there with my family and color. But I had seen the concentration in my mom’s face as she picked out her first pencil and the way she lit up when she saw Matt’s coloring. This was no time for pride. I looked down at the forest scene in front of me and then glanced up at my mother. I knew my minutes with her were precious and limited. My eyes started to burn with the salty sting of tears, so I distracted myself by shading in the grassy ground of the page.

Mom was entering her sixth year of chemo treatment. She had an aggressive stage IV breast cancer that had metastasized to her brain. She had undergone numerous radiation treatments and brain surgeries, the last couple of which had left her confined to a wheelchair. All her treatments had caused vision issues, so she relied on thick glasses to see. She also had problems with fine motor coordination. The thing was, if you spoke to her, you would forget all this. Her personality was preserved, and she was still herself through and through. She embodied life more than anyone I had ever known, and her smile could still light up a room despite the growing number of physical limitations she had.

I knew her prognosis was not good. I learned it through the years of watching her battle this illness. I heard the sympathetic whispers of people in the neighborhood when they saw us, and my school was making me speak with a social worker to help me through my mom’s illness and eventual death. I wasn’t sure how much my younger brothers understood, but they seemed to spend as much time as they could with her, so I think they knew deep down.

Mom settled on different shades of purple. She leaned over her coloring page, fiercely coloring in a large area, the pencil markings not staying in the lines at all. Matt looked over at her.

“Mom, that’s so nice!” he exclaimed. My brother had inherited her smile and her joyful attitude.

She beamed. She held up her artwork the way he had. “I tried my best. I know it’s not neat, but look, I got most of it in the lines! And look at this nice purple. I love purple!” We all took a minute and looked at her coloring page. Then we all showed ours in a kind of impromptu show-and-tell. They were all winners, she said.

She passed away the following year after fighting cancer for six-and-a-half years. It was a devastating loss for our family. Our mother was our glue and our beacon of light. She was also beloved by our friends and our community; our neighbors felt the loss too, as if she were a member of their own families.

In her last days, when she was confined to her bed and slowly losing consciousness, my mother told us that she had fought for us, wanting to be there for as many milestones as she could. Little did she know that we cherished these seemingly small moments with her just as much as we cherished her being there for the big ones.

Coloring books are sometimes short and sometimes long. Sometimes, they are filled with meticulous shading and coloring; other times, they are empty—just lines of black and white. Sometimes, the coloring isn’t perfect; it reaches outside the lines. But the colors are brilliant either way.

My mother’s life was one of those coloring books that was short but full of blues, greens, purples, yellows and every shade of every hue. The pages in the last part of her life had scribbling outside the lines, but that just shows the determination of the artist to continue coloring even when it was hard. She continued to fill out the book until the very end, not leaving a single page blank and leaving us with these beautiful pages to look back on.

— Cristina Vergara —