If you would like to send flowers or a donation to the charity of her choice, send via this GoFundMe, so that I may use the funds to offset expenses arising as a result of her life ending.

My mother, Barbara Ann Kennedy, lived a challenging life and met those challenges head-on, successfully feeding and taking care of her children, some of whom she cared for until the week of her death. She fed, often clothed, and bought gifts for them, no matter what life paved her road with. When she was diagnosed with atherosclerosis, leading to a blockage her doctor felt would be fatal, after a heart attack at the age of 35, I thought she was soon to pass on, but a stroke of bad luck had her car burst into flames, and the exercise of being a pedestrian gave her a second chance at life, turning lemons into lemonaid.

She worked in some rough and dangerous fields, as you may know, and being in those fields forced a horrible toll on her. To get through it, she had many years of embracing the drink, which damaged her health in ways I will not describe, but true to form she realized the soon-to-be fatal cost of numbing herself to those troubles and quit drinking AND smoking at the same time, in one successful shot. This prevented her from further injury, but the injuries already experienced would follow and torture her for the rest of her life, while she pushed a wire shopping cart onto busses and trains to get to grocery stores for food she would feed my brothers.

Pushing that shopping cart, with its rigid frame, cheap construction, and rock-hard wheels, irritated her joints causing inflammation of the nerve passages in her wrists, elbows, and shoulders, much like tennis elbow or a very widespread version of Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, which I'm naming because you may have heard of it. The nerve damage made her forearms feel like the skin was on fire, made the joints ache, and she could get no rest for it to heal because even food delivery services saving her from the cart couldn't save her from the floor mopping, dishwashing, and other tasks she voluntarily performed while walking back and forth across the most densely populated stretch of land in the U.S., in the name of caring for the sick and loving her family.

They say some folks get stir-crazy or fall apart after retirement. They struggle to find a new daily pattern of activity that engages their mind enough to keep it healthy, or they struggle to find meaning and value in even being alive, now that their purpose is gone. "When did work become my purpose? Must have happened while I wasn't paying attention.", and then the brave and capable find a new hobby or job. My mother lived that retirement nightmare after the undiagnosed colon cancer spread far enough to speckle the whole surface of her lungs with itself. As she lost the ability to breathe, exercise like washing a dish would leave her breathless and scared for a few minutes, but once she caught her breath she would resume labor, despite my PLEADING to allow me to do the work for her. I did not understand why she was making herself worse, but it came to me that this was a labor of love for her sons and she needed it to feel alive. The last chore she did was to scoop cat litter, and after that, all she had was if someone told her a story, because she was "too sick to pay attention to TV".

People say "She lost her fight with cancer", but it's anything but a fight. My mother's circumstances meant wasn't able to stage a "fight", but she fought reality every inch of the way as she was asking me to help her buy one of my brothers a new bed frame, the last day of her life that she was healthy enough to do so. No matter what she said to people as a result of the pain of her disease, she had a heart of gold and was out there trying to make the world a better place, and that's why it's so sad that her final wishes for burial were entirely concerned with her lack of finances and wanting not to be a financial drain on me. If it's too hard for you to imagine being so poor you can't find a reason to own a bank account, you may find it hard to grasp planning your end-of-life expenses around a dollar value. Still, I know what she wanted if she could afford it and I know what she wanted if she couldn't, so I'm taking my friend's advice to put this GoFundMe out there to see if we get enough money to do as she would have wished. If we don't, I'll do whatever I have to do so that she has the dignity that she wanted.

If you can spare a few bucks, that's appreciated. If you cannot, that's also appreciated. Let's keep things appreciated, but especially the thing that was a very poor woman living in a housing project on disability, taking care of other people with every last breath. No matter what happens, she deserves a lot of respect and recognition.