SEATTLE – Most of the time, Michelle Skyles can set her watch by the phone calls she shares with her mother.
 
At the very least, the Seattle Pacific assistant women's basketball coach can set her calendar by those calls.
                                                                                                                                                             
That's because on an often-crammed schedule with scouting, recruiting, practice, and about 30 Falcons games a year …
 
… every day is Mother's Day for Skyles.
 
This coming Sunday, Skyles will put basketball on the back burner to mark the occasion with mom Charlotte Skyles, along with dad Bob, and her three siblings, at the family home in Nampa, Idaho.
 
Like most such gatherings everywhere, it'll be a special day, with the sharing of food, conversation and memories.
 
But inside that Nampa house, it'll be a particularly meaningful affair, as it has been every May for the past five years.

By all accounts, this will be the fifth Mother's Day that Skyles and her mom shouldn't have had together after Charlotte suffered a major heart attack in Michelle's apartment shortly after a Falcons home game in November 2007.
 
“If I sat here, I could tell you a thousand different miracles that happened during that time – I wish I would have written them down,” Michelle Skyles said. “It was definitely God who had a plan in all of this, and that was extremely evident.
 
“Every doctor who has seen her since then said there's no medical reason why she's alive.”
 
Indeed, Charlotte Skyles flat-lined four times that night – once in Michelle's apartment, once in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and twice in the emergency room.
 
Today, Charlotte is very much alive – and more. She's active, talkative, and enjoying every moment of life at age 85. That includes exercising with weights, the treadmill or stationary bike a few times a week at a Nampa hospital, watching Boise State football or the Seattle Mariners on television, or just passing the time of day with Bob, her husband of almost 63 years.
 
“I feel like the Lord saved me with the hands of the surgeon,” she said. “That's what I tell people when they ask me, because I certainly believe that. When I go see my doctors here, they say, 'I can't believe that I should be looking at you.'
 
'STAND BACK!'
On the weekend before Thanksgiving 2007, the Seattle Pacific women's basketball team was ready to tip off what would become one of its finest seasons. The Falcons already had stunned the University of Washington in an exhibition game several days earlier and were ready to face Regis of Colorado on the first night of the annual Sodexo Tip-Off Classic in Brougham Pavilion.
 
Skyles, beginning her third year as SPU's lead assistant coach, was on the bench next to head coach Julie Heisey (then van Beek). Charlotte and Bob Skyles were in the stands, having arrived in town earlier that day. The Falcons rolled to a 73-54 victory.
 
After staying for the men's game that followed, the family headed to Michelle's apartment in the Greenwood neighborhood. They sat down to watch some college football, and it was then that Charlotte Skyles passed out.
 
Michelle banged on the door of Heisey, who lived in the apartment across the hall. Heisey wasn't home yet, but her sister was, and she came over to start CPR while Michelle called 911.
 
“Once they got there, I kind of got trapped back in my bedroom – they had as much stuff as they could hooked up to her,” who assisted with the CPR until medics arrived. “They cut her clothes off and said, 'Stand back!' and they shocked her.”
 
For Michelle, accustomed to pressure situations as a coach, this was way different than being down by one with five seconds to play.
 
“Having my mom lying there dead and seeing them work on her, it was really hard,” she said. “Then being at the hospital, I was just trying to be strong for my dad. He and I are similar in a lot of ways, and we relied on one another through that time period.”
 
In the ER at nearby Northwest Hospital, the prognosis was grim.
 
“The first news was that she wasn't going to make it at all. They said, 'She's really sick and in bad shape,” Michelle said. “She didn't have a pulse when they first started.
 
“Then it was like, 'We hope she can make it through the night.' The last update was at 1 or 2 a.m., and they felt like she was gaining strength at that point.”
 
A GLIMMER OF HOPE
When Michelle called at daybreak a few hours later, there was no further improvement – “Obviously, that was not what I wanted to hear,” she said.
 
She and her dad got dressed and went to the hospital.
 
“I started to read out of her Bible. I prayed with her and read from the Prayer of Jabez,” Michelle said.
 
Unknown to her and her dad at that point, Charlotte Skyles apparently could hear Michelle's readings and her prayers.
 
“At mid-morning, the nurse came in and said, 'Oh my gosh,' Michelle recalled. "She was working at the monitor, and she said, 'Your mom is improving. She can hear you. Keep reading, keep talking to her!”

She did. Then, just as the family was preparing to go get something to eat, one of Michelle's brothers was called to the room.
 
Charlotte was starting to wake up.
 
“The nurse walked in and said, 'Charlotte, my name is Susan. I'm the nurse, and you've had a massive heart attack,' Michelle recalled of that conversation. “She walked around the bed, and my mom followed her with her eyes. She told my mom she was going to put her into an induced coma, and Mom was scared at that point.”
 
That was Saturday, the day after the attack. The following Tuesday – two days before Thanksgiving – Charlotte Skyles underwent open heart surgery.
 
SLOW BUT STEADY JOURNEY
For Charlotte, those days and hours between the heart attack and the surgery are forever blurry. She does, however, remember her thoughts upon first learning from Michelle and others about everything that had taken place.
 
“I said, 'What are you talking about?' Charlotte recalled. “I just didn't realize for quite some time what was happening.”
 
She remained in the hospital for three weeks. In addition to medical care (“My cousin found an article in a magazine that said if you have to have a heart attack, the best place in the world to have one is in Seattle,” Michelle said), Charlotte got plenty of moral support.
 
“Michelle brought all of the basketball women from SPU to see me. Some of the players' parents even came to see me, which I thought was wonderful,” Charlotte said. “I was treated real well. I had two men nurses who were retired military, and they would tease me a lot. One came to the door one night and said, 'Get your glad rags on, we're going dancing.'
 
“I couldn't even get up.”

Added Michelle, “Everything was more than you could ever expect.”
 
After three weeks in the hospital in Seattle, Charlotte headed back to Nampa in an ambulance, with Michelle's niece riding along. She then spent about 10 days in the hospital there.
 
On Dec. 23, Charlotte Skyles went home. But far from the end of the process, it really was just beginning.
 
“It was well over a year” before she started feeling normal again, Charlotte said. “I still have good days and bad days. I've always been quite ambitious around the house, so if I work too hard, I pay for it the next day.”
 
JUST LIKE CLOCKWORK
While she doesn't always know for sure how much or how little she might feel like doing on any given day, there's one thing Charlotte Skyles does know for sure:
 
She'll get to talk to her youngest daughter on the phone.
 
“Michelle has been so much comfort to me in the mornings,” she said. “She gets a chance to call me real early in the morning on my exercise days. She and my husband check on me every time I go to make sure that I'm going to go do it.”

For Michelle, it's merely the continuation of a daily habit that started when she was in college.
 
“Being the baby (she is the youngest of the four Skyles children), I've just always been a mama's girl,” she said. “After all of that happened, it was more than one phone call a day.
 
“Sometimes, when I'm busy or when I rush the conversation, I think,' What if this is the last time?' So I probably treasure talking to her and seeing her now even more than I used to.”
 
Charlotte treasures those moments just as much.
 
 “I'm just so thankful and blessed that I got through this,” she said.
 
“Every day I'm here is a good day.”
 
Every day like that is a good day for Michelle Skyles, too. But she would take it one step further:
 
Every day is Mother's Day.