Gamer

I have been a slave to slang for as long as I can recall.   A lot of it comes from movies,  television,  and music but the terms that have the most staying power for me typically come from our national pastime.  Phrases like a cup of coffee,  rounding third and heading home,  and even a couple of Beat L.A.’s have become Picetti family vernacular — albeit on a far-less-than-you-might-think-from-this-sentence basis.

The reason that I am bringing up the whole sports vocab thing from my intro is that there is one word that I would use to describe my mom these past six or seven months and that word is gamer.

In the sporting sense,  a gamer is a person who puts it all out there day in and day out regardless of whether or not she is tearing the cover off of the ball or is mired in a 0 for 20 slump.  A gamer plays her ass off even when the game is out of reach.  A gamer steps up to the plate as if it were bases loaded with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of game seven of the World Series and her team was down by three runs.

My mom was such a gamer that she made the decision to keep the seriousness of her illness between her and her oncologist from December until this past Tuesday morning in order to not have anybody worry about her so she could continue taking care of her family as if nothing was wrong with her.

Even this past week, in the bottom of the ninth of her life, my mom dug in deep in the batter’s box, ready to take her final swings.   She hit the ball hard, put her head down and hustled towards first base.  In true gamer fashion, she continued her stride even after the ball had cleared the fence.   And as my mom was rounding third and heading home in the early hours of Saturday morning, every other departed member of our family’s starting lineup was waiting around home plate for the latest sure-fire first ballot Hall of Famer to score the go-ahead run.

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