The Hard and the Beautiful

Mama’s death had not been sudden. Shortly after Thanksgiving when it was clear that this current kidney stone attack might be her last, the urologist at St. Dominic’s Hospital in Jackson had told us that Mama’s kidneys were embedded with kidney stones of all shapes and sizes and that the resulting uremia was quite advanced. The closer we got to Christmas, the more hopeless her situation became. It was beginning to be one of those long goodbyes. I arrived home from college in time to be with her at the hospital the week before Christmas. All of my older brothers and sisters had families of their own and some lived in other states, but those living nearby had been able to take care of her. Death is one thing; dying is another. During the last week of Mama’s dying, my mind raced back repeatedly to my childhood. As a small child I was a big worrier. Because I knew my mother was so much older than the mothers of my classmates (they were the age of my older sisters), I was afraid my mother would die before I grew up. The doctor’s visits to our house to help Mama with yet another kidney stone attack intensified my fear. Although this anxiety subsided by the time I was a teen, occasional thoughts of losing Mama drove me again to the vast Bienville National Forest behind our house to cry alone. Please understand, but at some level I believe Mama willed her death. Despite her characteristic strength and joy of life, there was never any expression of bravado such as “I’m gonna conquer this.” Neither did she ever show a shred of self-pity. In fact, at the height of one of her worst kidney stone attacks, when Carlton and I were the only children still at home, she looked up at us from her bed and with a forced smile uttered quietly some words we had heard her say before, “I’ve always said that if God will let me live until my baby boys get grown, I’ll be ready to go.” With my eyes glued to Mama’s casket, I began complaining to God, once more raising those self-pitying “why” questions that surely most people have heard, felt, or expressed: Why did Mama have to suffer so much toward the end? How will Carlton and I ever be able to effectively describe and tell our children about the grandmother they never knew? When the million-mile walk to the front door of the church ended and we were outside, three things happened that totally – totally – dispelled my grief, never to have it return. The first thing was the breezy Christmas Day air which seemed to whisper and say, “You know well that your mother was always forward looking and strong. Life goes on and you must as well.” The second thing was the sight of an elderly couple standing outside the church off to themselves. Rev. Louie Farmer, the director of the Baptist Student Union at the University of Southern Mississippi, and his wife – “Miss Louie” to Baptist students at USM – had left their family on Christmas morning to drive ninety miles north for Mama’s funeral. I never learned how they knew about Mama’s death. They and my hundreds of friends in the Baptist Student Union had been praying for Mama, but I had had no communication with anyone at USM since coming home for Christmas break. After talking with me briefly and assuring me of their continued prayers, this dear couple got into their car and headed back to Hattiesburg. Their selflessness and their substantial expression of love and support further put my grief in its place. The third thing was the Christmas Day meal our family shared hardly an hour after Mama was buried. The laughter and storytelling, so common to all of our gatherings, was not abated by the loss of our mother. Our Christmas joy amidst the sorrow was no indication of anybody’s super-spirituality; rather, it was a testimony to the power of what our parents had taught us. In this case it was words from the Bible: “Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?” Neither kidney stones nor poverty defeated Mama’s spirit or outlook. Neither did poverty defeat her children whose lives she enriched. We dreamed and shared dreams about our future, sang songs, told stories, prayed prayers, read the Bible, tried not to “talk about people,” and kept on living life and acting silly. My siblings and I have taken many different paths and engaged in many different livelihoods. For just over half a century I have spent my time and energy telling high school seniors, college freshmen, seminary students, and prison inmates to say and write “centers on,” not “centers around,” to avoid ending sentences with prepositions, and to heed the advice of Mark Twain: “Use the right word and not its second cousin.” In other words, I was an English teacher. But no amount of language study, no number of degrees or years of teaching the language can equip one to write about things of the heart. Words are merely the vehicles upon which our thoughts ride and often there are just no vehicles that can convey our thoughts, wishes, dreams, our sadness, or even our joy. We can only do our best with the vehicles we manage to muster and hope that good old Mark Twain would be pleased. If Shakespeare was correct in writing that “What’s past is prologue,” then I pray that I and my sixteen brothers and sisters whom I celebrate in this book will be able to pass on to our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren the past that our dear parents provided for us. That past included the beliefs that “man cannot live by bread alone,” that “he who will not work shall not eat,” that “laughter is medicine,” and that “joy cometh in the morning.”