I've met a lot of tough guys before. Tough gals, too. They're fishermen, hunters, hikers, bikers and cowboys, sometimes farmers, pharmacists, midgets and musicians.
How do I define tough?
Mom.
Mine just turned 54. Janelle Walter is the kind of tough that could make you regret you winced after slapping a scalding barbeque.
About four years ago, the crashing vibrations shook me from sleep in our Colorado Springs, Colo., home. I jogged to the laundry room. There was mom, lying face down on the floor.
I picked her up.
She cried.
I went back to bed.
She often awoke in the dark, her knees clamped to her belly. Once the convulsions stopped, maybe she'd go to sleep.
Each morning, she awoke, and as she tried to stand, she'd groan in massive agony. She'd limp to the refrigerator and grab edges of furniture to stay on her feet.
"I found a place within me to cope with it," she said. "To cope with the pain."
Mom was independent, someone who had hiked 14,115-foot Pikes Peak, traversed far into various sections of forest and scaled the steepest of rock formations.
Now there she was, crippled and sinking in the opposite direction.
The image occasionally pops into my vision of mom leaning helplessly against the front door.
"You're not going out like this," I told her.
Mom explained she was in a cocoon, that's all, and she would eventually break through. She said one day, she'd be back on Pikes Peak.
But we couldn't afford medical attention. Couldn't know what was crumbling her being.
Sometimes in life, there actually are people who can appear as angels in the middle of a most horrid blackness. One day, after my mom sobbed at the thought that she could have a brain tumor, a local chiropractor named Scott Cook gave my mom a free MRI.
The medical imaging technique revealed a tumor that had been forming on her upper spine, partially wrapping around three vertebrae. Soon, doctors put mom into an induced sleep.
As doctors removed the tumor, mom dreamed she was in a dark tunnel with walls of sparkling granite. There was no light at the end. Mom floated around, marveling at this cozy tunnel. Finally, she felt no pain.
I've never been too sure about miracles, but I did watch mom bust through that cocoon. She began on a walker, then graduated to a cane. Two months after surgery, another first: She could stand alone and feel hot water melt into her scalp as she washed her hair. She cried again.
About a year later, mom went back to school at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs. She majored in natural resource technology. She took classes for yoga and pilates. Later that semester, in a wilderness survival class, my 51-year-old mother backpacked eight miles alongside students in their late teens and early 20s.
Guess what? Mom held her own.
"I was elated," she said. "I cried tears of joy because I could do it again."
In a three-year span, mom went from hobbling as she clutched pieces of furniture to climbing as she clutched the cracks of a towering rock formation.
Three pictures, taken recently, are scattered on my refrigerator: Two are of mom rock climbing, and in the other, she's holding a half-full water bottle with a sweater tied around her waist and a cheeky smile stretched across her face. She was standing near the summit of Pikes Peak.
I look at them, smile proudly, and realize I'll never know the true meaning of "tough."
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