MAMA

My mama was my dearest friend. I lost her forever on Tuesday, July 13, 2010, at 8:13am. I am not ashamed to say that I cannot stop crying over her. My heart is shattered.

My mother loved all of her children. She sewed dresses for my sisters, Carolyn and Carlene. My daddy bought my first saxophone for me. My brother, Arnold, wanted a drum set so daddy began making payments on a set from a private owner. The owner came to our house when my daddy could not come up with the current payment. He was going to take the drums away. Mama took off the gold ring she'd won in a contest and gave it to the man. He was happy; the ring was worth more than the drum set.

Mama never had much in the way of material things. Once she cried over a new microwave oven we, her children, gave her one Christmas. We were a poor family. After my dad decided to become an evangelist, in 1969, he moved the family into a house in Chocowinity, North Carolina. I was in the army at Ft. Bragg, at the time. The house had no paint on the outside. Mama had to burn wood chips in an iron wood stove in the kitchen to heat water to wash dishes. We had to heat water on that stove to take baths.

Once, while daddy was away on a revival, we had no food in the cupboards. Not a single can of food. But we survived it all because mama was there and she loved us and it was her spirit of love that kept us going through the hard times.

While living in Washington, North Carolina, daddy, inexplicably, moved our family 17 times in 17 years. Once mama said to daddy: "If you'll stay in one place, I'll get a job and make the mobile home payments". And she did. One day, arriving home with my brother and two sisters, mama was greeted by daddy who introduced her to a couple in the living room. He told mama that the couple were moving in that evening. In front of these people, my mother, brother, and sisters had to pack there belongings and leave what, that morning, was their home.

I don't know how my mother survived the things my dad put mama through, during the many years of their marriage. She was a rock. Daddy became a better man after becoming a Christian, but he could still be difficult to get along with.

Mama suffered from chronic nausea for at least the last seven years of her life. I was caregiver for mama and daddy from September 2004, when mama started having seizures, until Mama passed away. Many times I'd hear her say: "Oh, Lord, I'm so sick. I don't think I can take it anymore". Sometimes she'd have a break from the nausea, but only briefly. Medications gave her minimal relief, if any at all.

Nausea, rather than her cancer, diagnosed June 10, 2009, was the bane of Mama's existence. It made her life almost unbearable. I searched and searched on the internet for a cure, but to no avail.

Mama was one of the funniest people I've ever seen, when she wasn't sick. She could do or say comical things with a straight face that would make us all laugh.
She read the bible from beginning to end seven times. She was a praying woman. Her prayers were the sweetest I've ever heard.

My sweet, dear mother is in heaven now. She is with my dad, her mom and dad, siblings and other loved ones. [To be "absent from the body" is to be "present with the Lord" (2 Cor. 5:8)]. She no longer suffers neverending sickness, sleepless nights, and excruciating pain.

Mama is waiting for Arnold, Carolyn, Carlene, and me in heaven. I know that I will see my blessed Mother's angelic face again. I hope that day is soon, because right now, my heart is breaking and hurting so badly that I don't know how much longer I can stand the merciless, mind-bending, heart-wretching pain.

*****

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says: :There, she is gone!"

"Gone where?"

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear the load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says: "There, she is gone!" There are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: "Here she comes!"
And that is dying.
--Henry Van Dyke

*****