On the Loss of My Mother and the Importance of Baseball

Some of you might know me for my sarcastic, annoying, assholish comments on this site. I enjoy talking with you guys during games, and you are the only place I have found that offers interesting discussion. I have mentioned a couple of times here that my mother was fighting a losing battle with breast cancer. Wednesday evening, she finally relented and passed away. But this is not about my personal struggles or my family life. This is baseball. This is what we all love and watch, even if the M's stink; Oh, and they often stink. This is about why we all need this dumb little sport.

I'm sure I'm not the only one here who was raised on the game of baseball as a child. Football was slow. Basketball had its moments. Hockey was for Canadians. Soccer was for Europeans. But my family loved baseball. My fondest memories are of going to the Kingdome and watching Junior belt one, or everyone getting a buzzcut like the Bone. Baseball taught me many morals about life. No matter how bright of a shining star you are, you are allowed a bad day. Or a slump. Or, even a bad year. Or your body can literally fail you. It doesn't mean you can't bounce back. And it doesn't mean that everything else you do is useless.

My mother and father are the ones that took me to these games. Granted, after educating myself these last few years through this website and the use of statistics, I now realize that they never really knew the game all that well. But they enjoyed it. And the thing about baseball season is that it goes almost every day for six months. This, I think, helped me the most through this horrible time in my life. My mother's cancer slowly, but severely, debilitated her daily life and demanded more of me taking care of her. But every day I was able to relax and enjoy a nice, calm game of baseball.

She couldn't get up to watch the games with me anymore, eventually. I would have to run and tell her whenever anything happened of interest. I would bring her the laptop after games to show her a highlight. She would get on Facebook the next day and watch. I would share the inspiring stories of the players with her. Every day baseball was the thing that kept me going and kept her going, but in different ways.

It wasn't until Wednesday night that I truly appreciated how much the Seattle Mariners have gotten me through all of this. We all knew that her final night was coming soon, but we didn't expect it to be tonight. Suddenly she got incredibly worse, and I had to watch over her. To pass the time, I turned on the Yankees-M's game. I had no real reason to watch, but Wily Mo was DHing, and Vargas has that new turn thing working for him. There are always reasons to watch, I guess. But then I realized that she had passed away. The game was incredibly boring, stuck in a 1-1 tie, but I had to wait for hospice nurses to come, and later, the funeral home. Baseball was on to take my mind from it. I waited and waited for them to come, and I waited for the arrangements to be made, and for everything to be done. But baseball kept going. No one wanted to score. League gave up a deep drive, but it fell into a glove, and baseball was still on. Extra innings started, and my mind was able to be occupied while the thing I had dreaded for months happened right in the other room. Saunders reached over the wall and stole a home run, so baseball was still on. I paused my DVR so that I could take care of some things, and came back, and accidentally hit the live button. That was okay. It was the 12th, and no one had done anything. I left, consoling family members, and doing what I could to keep it together. I walked back to the television, and saw Cory Wade toss a 2-1 hanger to little Luis Rodriguez. A crack, and it was flying. "There's a drive!" Dave Sims said. I sat down in front of the TV and smiled.

This wouldn't be a walk-off that I could go and share with my mother. I couldn't take my laptop into her room and play the video for her. She can't wake up Thursday morning and see it in her Facebook feed. The Mariners couldn't give my mother the gift of a heart-lifting win tonight. But what they could give was a little smile to a son who had just lost his mother. They fought all night long, making the game go on longer. They kept my mind occupied, and that's all I really could have asked from them that night. Instead, they did all that, and then my favorite little bench player gave the ball a nice long ride. And maybe that's another thing we can learn from baseball. You don't always have to be a star to shine.

I have many memories of baseball, and many of my mother. I had always dreaded the memory I would have of the day that my mother died. The Seattle Mariners gave me a memory I could cherish.

Thank you, baseball.