Thinking About Mama
Mama died when she was 42. She had battled with breast cancer for several years before that. She had always said that she would fight until God allowed her to have a glimpse of heaven but if she ever got even a glimpse of paradise, she was going home.
God showed her paradise early in 2003 and by May we were saying our goodbyes. This woman was known for the way she loved. She was real, she was honest, and she knew how to love so fiercely, so sweetly, so gently, and so wholly that anyone who had been loved by her felt like family. So, it really wasn’t a surprise to me when there were people standing on the lawn outside of my dad’s house grieving her loss but not wanting to knock on the door and disturb my dad and my brothers and me those nights in May when she was on her deathbed. They wanted to give us the space and privacy we had asked for, but could not bring themselves to stay away from Ms. Mary’s house. The house had always been opened to them before. They never had to call ahead or announce their visit. Everyone who came was family. And her death was difficult for all who had been loved by her and had loved her in return.
I’d never known grief before. I’d been sad. As a child, I cried when my guinea pig died, I wailed when my dogs had died, cried ugly tears of goodbye to friends when we’d had to move, and I had been very sad when family friends and my grandmother had passed away.
But grief had never crossed my path and I was not acquainted with the slow burn of the realization of immense loss, the roaring fury of the flames of that loss that engulfed peace and happiness. And with it, strangled the strength for the present and hope for the future, separately and together and all at once and at its own will. Nor was I acquainted with the infuriating warmth of acceptance and the ashes that softly fall later with the finality of it all.
I have never met a person who sought grief, who searched it out, grabbed its hand and walked with it. No. The people I knew who had loss someone or something were all thrown into its arms and either fought wildly to be free of it or fought wildly to be destroyed by it. Some might have done both but not at the same time. I was one of those.
I was devastated by its embrace and at first thought I could only be destroyed by it. My mother was my best friend in the world. She and I talked every day of my life.
There was not a day in my adult life that I did not speak to my mother until the Army sent me off to training and there were days that I could not call anyone. But on all the days other than those two weeks or so of my life, I had heard her voice. Towards the end when she was very sick and in hospice, she began to talk about leaving us and that was the first time I’d ever heard that voice speak of anything that had to do with death and it was unnerving and terrifying. At first, she told me not to cry. She said that she did not want to see me cry, and she did not want me to cry for her. And I tried very hard to be stoic and hold the tears back when I was in her presence, knowing that soon I would not be able to ever hear her voice again in this life, only in my dreams. She would be gone. And though there was solace in knowing that she was heaven bound, my heart was wrenched inside and I in return, was a mangled thing, twisted, unsteady, and not myself.
She must have seen the damage this request was doing to me because it was only a couple days later that she said, “It isn’t fair for me to ask you not to cry. You cry. You cry out. You scream if you have to. You are allowed to feel whatever you need to feel. But when I’m gone, I want you to celebrate my life. No black at my funeral, no sad stories. I want it to be a celebration.”
And that permission to cry out, to feel all the wretched sensations of grief’s particular hold on me was exactly what I needed in order to find the strength to begin to fight its grip. I would not be destroyed by it. I would overcome it by wrestling it in the shadows of the night and punching it down and back in the stark brightness of the day. And in doing so, I would hear my mother’s voice in my own voice, as I comforted those who were also locked in battle with grief over her passing and as I attempted to love my babies as wonderfully well as she had loved me and so many other of God's children.
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