My mom in the early 20th Century before she met my father.

But this is the way I remember her most, taken on Easter of 1966, just after I got out of serving four years in the military and was growing a beard, as a sign of my liberation, that I shaved on Mother's Day after being with her in the hospital as she was dying and calling out for her oldest, who was a Franciscan missionary in Japan, and me, her youngest, who she didn't recognize.

I blamed the beard and made a vow to never grow another and haven't.

Look at her sweet smile, despite the fact, as we later learned, she was riddled with cancer and in great pain when this photo was taken.

I've missed her every day of the fifty years since she passed.