One year ago today my mom died. Two days later the world shut down for COVID. I haven’t posted here in a while, but as my dad has spent the year grieving in almost isolation and the funeral my mom planned for herself during her 12 years of cancer still has been unable to happen, I figured it was time to put out into the universe my thoughts about her. They would have been much better spoken and maybe one day I will, but for now it’s time that I share. One year ago today, my mom died. If you read any other posts you’ll see her own comments over the years on this blog. Now this year has passed and all the “firsts” are done, tears are for gratitude and not grief. I love you mom.
Institutional green beans! We’ll come back to that.
My mom had a personality on Earth unlike anyone most people have ever met. For better or for worse, she communicated and thought differently, but she had a heart that I’m sure was from heaven. She would connect things that were questionably connectable. She could find the gravesite of an ancestor in just about any city we’d visit. She would share stories three generations up the family tree, or with strangers from the newspaper as if she’d lived it with the people who were there. And…she would do these things with an unexplainable sense of pride and ownership and righteousness.
Some of the important lessons my mom taught me were not through her bizarre communication and thinking. They were directly spoken and unspoken in a few quiet, occasional moments. They were lessons of faith, and love, and service, and strength.
We weren’t the preacher’s family who sat on the front row each Sunday. Instead, we’d sit in the balcony. She would sit there. I could usually be found lying on the floor underneath the pews with Matchbox cars or GI Joe figures. I’ve never forgotten the Sunday when she reached down and patted my hip that the sermon was over and it was time for me to sit in the pew before communion or collection came around. I don’t know if she wrote her check in church or wrote it before and brought it in, but I’ll never forget my bewilderment and awe that it was for $600. I whispered to her, “Mom, if we’re poor, how can you give that much to this big ‘ol church?”
I will never forget the glare she gave me, lacking any forgiveness, obviously embarrassed that I had called out anything about her tithe. Given that we were at MPPC, it could have been embarrassment that hers was smaller than someone else’s nearby! Nonetheless, that moment and her words stuck with me because she clearly told me, “Don’t you ever question how we use our finances. Tithing what’s been given to us is what I am called to do.” For all the things she approached in round-about ways, or making assumptions, I will never forget how she clearly and directly communicated her faith that day. I respect and want to carry that part of her into my own life and faith.
Prior to Christmas of 2016, we got news that cancer had returned again. For a disease that only 50% of people survive after five years, her strength had already put this disease in its place by an additional three! We all gathered while she was feeling healthy to share a holiday with all her family. Once again, her faith brought together the spectrum of her family’s faiths. This time we were sitting in the front pew of her beloved Sardis church while she sang in the choir for the Christmas Eve service. At that point, she just wanted normalcy so she hadn’t shared with church people that she was concerned about her health again.
As she sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, we all looked on from that front pew. Any past frustrations or misunderstandings disappeared. Mom looked like an angel in her element, singing with her friends and smiling down at us. The thought I had been avoiding for eight years crept into my mind that this was about as close as a person could be to attending their own funeral. Sitting up there with the angels, seeing her kids and her kids’ kids, and her husband, in that front pew gazing upon her, I’m sure she saw tears pouring down our cheeks in the candlelight of that Christmas Eve. She cried and smiled her way through “Silent Night”, and none of us mentioned this metaphor. I will always keep that image of her love and strength in my heart. If she can no longer be here for this beautiful gathering for her, we shared that moment and she knew it.
During that same trip, I asked her to take a ride with me back to the MPPC balcony under the guise of seeing the old church decorated for Christmas. My aim was to talk about her feelings on life and death and give her my own peace that her life’s work as my mom had been successful. I thought I was ready to have that conversation, but the moment we walked into our old sanctuary, I fell apart and held my mom and sobbed as never in my life. I’ll never understand how her frail 120 pound frame held up my weeping 6’ 2”, but that’s what moms do.
We walked up to the balcony and talked for a couple hours. She shared her pride in each one of her kids. Her amazement at her grandchildren. Her love for her own parents and grandparents and sibling and the life she’d been given from Chattanooga, TN to Charlotte, NC. She said she wasn’t scared of dying, but she wasn’t ready to go either. Obviously, in her strength she squeezed many more years. Not surprisingly, she said her biggest sorrow in life was getting to know other patients at the hospital who didn’t have the insurance or money to cover the huge expenses of the same disease and feeling how unfair it was that she was so blessed in her life to not have that additional burden. In her darkest hours, facing pain and even demise, her heart hurt more about being able to give as she is called. In that same space from my childhood, I learned from her again that service to others is what our faith calls us to do and no one else to question.
We took a picture that day with the majestic stained-glass window behind us. So many times I stared at that window during church as a child. The colorful mosaic behind our selfie now makes me remember all of the images of faith, love, service, and strength that shined through my mom’s life. She served on Boards for orphans, taught pregnant teens and struggling learners, raised a husband and three kids, cared for ailing parents, took in person after person in need and became their surrogate parent, participated in circles and Sunday schools, and sang as one of many in many choirs. Through any struggle, she lived to serve and give of herself.
And so we look at the whole of a life lived. The things we couldn’t understand about her and the things we knew clearly. Of all these things and memories, the one I shared with her that day in the balcony is of the memory and lesson from her that is sparked when I open a can of green beans. In the strangely metallic but pure smell of a can of institutional green beans, I am transported back to being a young elementary kid who she took to school with her at the United Cerebral Palsy school in downtown Charlotte. The names and stories of these kids with varying abilities that she had shared at our supper table came alive. At lunchtime, my mom helped serve trays of mac-and-cheese, chicken nuggets, and institutional green beans. I was at once puzzled at their drooling and amazed that they were able to move around with different non-motorized devices of the day. She didn’t hesitate to love these other children as if they were her own. And the way she loved her own was to leave us an example of faith, love, strength, and service. That’s enough.
Mom’s Daily Prayer
“Lord Jesus, Think on me; for I am but your child ….
Hold me, Love me, Lift me up …. and make my life worthwhile !
THANKS BE TO GOD !
Beautiful.