Mama

(Mama around 30 years old)

March 3, 1970, is one of the darkest days in my memory.  Both physically and emotionally. 

Physically I was a sixteen-year-old girl sitting in afternoon Spanish class looking out the window at the black clouds that had suddenly covered the sun.  The sky turned so very dark. Then came the wind and the rain. Back then there were no weather alerts but I’m almost sure that there was a strong storm very close by. 

Emotionally I was just a little girl worried about her Mama that day.  She was being transported by ambulance from our small county hospital to a large hospital in a metropolitan city about seventy miles away.  When I had visited her in the hospital the night before she was delirious and didn’t recognize me. That broke my heart. My emotions were in a jumble but having come from a family where showing your emotions were sometimes frowned upon, I was trying to keep all that to myself.

I admit I was not a very good student that day between the raging storm outside the windows and the one raging in my heart and soul.  Then there was a knock on the classroom door…something that was very out of the ordinary…and I looked up to see Mama’s doctor through the small diamond shaped glass window.  At the sight of him my heart came up into my mouth and I felt sick.  I knew there must be something very wrong.  My teacher went out and spoke with him first and then came back to the door and called me out.  The two of them took me across the hall to the teacher’s lounge and Dr. Ketchum told me that Mama had passed away in the ambulance that afternoon.  I wanted to scream!  I wanted to lash out at someone in some way! I wanted to cry!  But what I did was grit my teeth together and ball my hands up into fists and determine in my mind that I was not going to cry in front of these people!  That nobody was going to see my true emotions!

From that time on I never really felt like a young person anymore.  I was the only child left at home and so I became the cook and housekeeper for my Daddy while also going to school every day.  Thankfully Daddy was a man of habit and he believed in everything having a place and always kept things in their place.

My Mama has been in heaven for forty-three years today.  If anyone ‘’deserved’’ to go to heaven in my eyes, it was Mama.  She was truly the best woman I have ever known!  But as good as she was, even she never ‘’deserved’’ to go to heaven!  And she would have been the first to tell you that!  She went to heaven because at some point in her life she realized her need as a sinner to have Jesus as her Saviour!  And she trusted Him to be all that she needed for salvation.

My life’s goal is to be the kind of godly woman that Mama was!

Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised.  Proverbs 31: 30