The bye weekend will be for a final good-bye ...

Every NFL coach says the bye weekend comes at a good time for his team. He has no choice. What's he going to say? "I wish we had the bye three weeks from now."

For this NFL newspaper beat writer, the bye will be invested in driving home to Dixon, Ill., where I will meet up with my three brothers and three sisters to say a final good-bye to the saint of a woman who brought us into the world and sacrificed everything to bring us up the right way.

Elizabeth Curnutte has been sent home, basically, to die. Two months, tops.

All treatments, radiation and chemotherapy, have been suspended. Doctors say there is nothing else to do for her inoperable lung cancer. Her first and only chemotherapry session put her in the hospital with stroke-like symptoms and almost killed her. Her body, at 77-plus years, is broken.

Her doctor says she is going back and forth between this world and the after-life. She is conversing at times with her late husband, our father, John Curnutte, who died in February 2003.

They truly had a storybook marriage that weathered many tough times, financially and otherwise. They had the type of resilient love I failed to generate in my broken marriage. They reacted to challenges by getting closer, not further apart. There was no blame, just a shared dedication to finding solutions. They had a model marriage, one I had hoped badly to duplicate.

Mom's optic nerve is bad, so her vision is going. We want to be there so she can see us one more time. We want her to hear us tell her how much we love and adore her and how thankful we are that we were born to her. If I get any private time, I want to sit beside her hospital bed -- which is in her living room -- hold her hand and read a short story to her. It's nothing I've written. It's much better.

I woke up this morning, feeling like I had been hit emotionally by a truck -- it's that way every Monday after a game -- but I stumbled toward my coffee maker, as I do every morning, thanking God for everything in my life: my three children, my family, friends, the different communities of which I am a member (St. Vivian Parish, the Powell Crosley YMCA, Finneytown Public Schools, The Enquirer, Enquirer readers), my faith, my health.

I can't begin to explain what my relationship with Enquirer readers means to me. I need to write these entries. It makes me feel better. I start these personal entries at one point and don't really know where I'm headed. Then 15, 20 minutes later I'm there and I've learned something. Some answers come when my fingers are on the keyboard. A writer, well, writes. I value the honest relationship I've developed with readers through the past 13 years at The Enquirer, whether I've been in Sports or Metro or Tempo. Sometimes, I wonder why I've stayed. But then the answer comes. Where else would I want to be?

I wonder why God has given me so much. I can't explain. I can't help but think of the families I know in Gonaives, Haiti, with whom I spent two-plus weeks in May.

Why am I do damned competitive? Why do I have such a pronounced mean streak? Why can't I just give everything away? Why can't I surrender more to God's will? Why do I think so much? Why can't I turn off my brain?

I'm about to lose my second parent. That umbrella is gone, the safety net pulled away. I'm the net for three children.

I didn't put any music on today, but there is one song that has been going through my head for more than a week. It's from Jackson Browne's "The Pretender," which like Springsteen's "Darkness on the Edge of Town," is a touchstone record I go back to often.

I don't mean to be a downer. This place is where I am. But there's a yellow sun and a spotless blue sky outside my window. I'm headed there.

This is the song "Sleep's Dark and Silent Gate:"

"Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder
Where my life will lead me
Waiting to pass under Sleep's dark and silent gate

"I found my love too late
Running around day after day
Looking for the time to play
While my old friends slipped away

"Never should have had to try so hard
To make a love work out, I guess
I don't know what love has got to do with happiness
But the times when we were happy
Were the times we never tried

"Sitting down by the highway
Looking down the road
Waiting for a ride
I don't know where I've been
Wishing I could fly away
Don't know where I'm going
Wishing I could hide
Oh God this is some shape I'm in
When the only thing that makes me cry
Is the kindness in my baby's eye

"Sometimes I lie awake at night and wonder
Where the years have gone
They have all passed under
Sleep's dark and silent gate"