My story is about young Bentari, but his mother and her selfless care for him are clearly the enabling power behind his surprising abilities.

Well, my own mother’s final stand is represented in the story, if only in a small way. It’s mighty important to me. See first paragraph, chapter 19—the odd word “fistula” is not accidental. Mom spent the last year of her life living with the dreadful condition of a fistula smack in the middle of her own belly.

The thing resulted through absolutely no fault of Mom’s, other than the fact that she chose to have elective bladder surgery to correct discomfort that she had lived with for years. Though mom was looking forward the operation, it didn’t work out as planned. In fact, things went terribly wrong. She spent six weeks in intensive care and five months in the hospital. But she did not ever, not once, complain for her lousy luck.

My brothers and I took turns nursing her at home, giving dad a break that he desperately needed. I was taking my turn one night tending to her in the den that had been converted to her constant care facility for those precious final months. She was having a terrible paroxysm of coughing from the congestive heart failure—one of the many domino health twists that seemed to pile on top of the beta-strep, the e-coli and the other infections that her physicians had not prevented and could not cure without three surgeries to remove gangrenous intestinal sections bit by bit. Nor could the doctors force Mom’s insulted flesh to mend after that last operation—hence the fistula. It spilled feces from an open wound that could not be closed.

We took care of this uncomplaining woman. I had always known she was my hero. But on that night when she asked only for some help to spoon down a little cough syrup and I choked back tears wishing in vain for some small way that I could do more to help her, to ease her monumental suffering, she whispered to her number two boy, “It could be worse.”

Indeed.

I will not forget that night. Those words aren’t the prettiest, not the most poetic to live by. But, by God, they make me want to fight-on whenever I find myself on the losing end of some score or another. And I have the strongest human being that I have ever known to thank for the lesson—my own dear Mom, a woman with the heart and noble mien of a tawny lioness.

Talk about a mother’s strength and love and endurance—thy name was Jo (Tate) Brown, a woman of achievement.

Photos: Clair and Jo Brown, Mom w/ Art and Tim, Jo in high school and as a care-free girl in summer