Tempus Fugit: Yesterday Was My Mom’s 95th Birthday….

Yesterday was my mother’s 95th birthday.

She, of course, is no longer here. She died in the early morning of Sunday, July 19, 2015, after a five-year struggle with dementia and the effects of a long and eventually failed recovery from an operation to repair her spine.

I do my best not to dwell on Mom’s death, how hard her last half-decade of life was on her, or the various consequences of her passing- – both good and bad. In fact, sometimes I try not to think about my mother at all. Not because I don’t love her or cherish her memory, but because her passing, even eight years later, still feels like a fresh, unhealed wound.

Still, sometimes I catch myself remembering events from when I was a kid – either in Bogota, where we lived for nearly six years, or in Miami, which was our home for most of my life.

For instance, yesterday I vividly remembered how we went together to see Raiders of the Lost Ark a few days after it hit theaters in South Florida in June of 1981. Mom liked all kinds of movies, and she loved Raiders – at least in part – because it reminded her of the Saturday matinees she had seen as a child and teenager in the 1930s and ‘40s. (She also liked Harrison Ford as both Indiana Jones and Han Solo, plus she was a John Williams fan like me.)

Back in the ‘80s, Mom and I saw, in theaters, the three installments of what was then the “Indiana Jones Trilogy,” starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark and continuing with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).

And although Mom wasn’t initially into Star Wars, we saw all but one of the six “George Lucas era” Star Wars movies at various theaters in the Miami area. The exception? Return of the Jedi, and that was because she was working at a Linens ‘n’ Things store near Bird Road and SW 87^th Avenue in 1983.

We watched a lot of movies, including some (like Roman Holiday) that I bought for her on DVD or Blu-ray, during that long, sad period of her declining health. Obviously, hanging out with Mom to watch movies was easier (and more fun) in the first two years of the Times of Troubles (roughly between June of 2010 and the summer of 2012), when the effects of dementia had not robbed my mom of her ability to follow a movie’s plot or enjoy an actor’s onscreen performance.

After 2013, though, as Mom’s mental acuity declined with the relentless progress of dementia that did her in, watching movies was harder for her, and even though I never put a stop to our Movie Nights, it was obvious – to me, at least – that she wasn’t able to understand what was happening on her Samsung HD TV set.

Last night, I thought briefly about watching one of the four Indiana Jones movies I have on Blu-ray, but I changed my mind even before I reached for the Indiana Jones 4-Movie Collection $K UHD Blu-ray box set on my Ikea Billy bookcase. I decided against it, though. Partly because it was already past 10 PM and I didn’t think I’d be able to stay awake till past midnight, but mostly because it would just make me miss my mom more than I do already.