My nephew Dave is taking a year off now that he's out of high school. He's pumping gas while he figures out where to go next. We had a good gab while he filled my car when I was in the village yesterday.

It's hard to believe that this time last year we were facing the possibility that we might have to attend his funeral.

All last summer he'd been having headaches of increasing severity, and the family doctor kept saying it was migraines. And then ... then this big, strong 17-year-old collapsed at home. They took him to the ER of our local hospital, the doctors took one look at him, and rushed him to the big teaching hospital in Sherbrooke.

The surgeon told Mike later that when he saw Dave, who was in a coma at that point, he assumed they were looking at a brain tumour and that there was a very good chance Dave wouldn't make it through the night.

Brain surgery can be Black & Decker city, eh. They cut a hunk out of the back of Dave's skull just like we cut the top out of a Hallowe'en pumpkin, set it aside, and when they looked in they found an abscess (basically a sac of puss) about the size of an egg pressing on his optic nerve. It was close to breaking and if it had, the poison would have killed him then and there.

It took four months of heavy duty antiobiotics delivered by a computerized pump directly into Dave's heart to wipe out what did leak out of that sac. And to this day his vision hasn't fully recovered, although they tell him it will with time. But he's here, on the right side of the grass, and that's what counts.

Dave's mom, my sister-in-law, is simply the �bermom. She was fanatic about all the mom stuff like balanced meals, super clean house, a place for everything and everything in it's place. She watched her kids like a hawk.

I am more the trainwreck kind of mom--we ate lots of leftovers here, the place occasionally looks like gale force winds just passed through, and at times I have dust bunnies large enough to christen.

But the thing is, no matter how well you do the mom thing and how much you try to protect your kids, sometimes this big hand is gonna reach down from the sky and smack you upside the head anyhow. When it happened to Dave, this guy I've loved since he was a bitty baby, it shook me to my toes. There but for the grace of God, as they say ...

When Jess was young I used to think, "Well, when she turns 18 we can stop worrying about her." Then I bumped the date forward to when she graduated university.

Now I realize that although she is a smart, independent adult and fully able to take care of herself, she will always be our kid. Somewhere, in some small corner of our hearts, we will always worry a teensy bit about her.

I thought I had only promised 'til death do us part to one person. It appears I forgot to read the small print, eh, before I went and did that spawning thingie.

Silly me.