My Mother . . . . Mama

Recently I received an e-mail from an acquaintance, Lucille I’ll call her, after a long gap in our communications. It was a one-line message: “My mother will probably die today or tomorrow. Please pray.” I responded immediately, sending my prayers and my support. My message included the following: “Regardless of the path there has been in any mother-daughter relationship, I feel it is always the little girl in us who loses her mother.”

Later that same morning I received another e-mail from this woman: “Mama just died at 11:15.”

Consciously or unconsciously, I felt that Lucille had affirmed my feelings about a daughter’s loss of her mother. No longer ‘my mother’, but ‘Mama” what we as children called our mother.

Among the many emotions surrounding my grief at my own mother’s death was one of loss, and the knowledge of the unremitting absence of death that the “little girl” in me felt so keenly. My mother died while she was a resident in a nursing home in the Dallas metroplex. At the time I was living and working as a community organizer in South Carolina and received a shocking phone call one evening from my brother with the news that my mother had died. I had spent an extended period of time with my mother just six weeks prior, as I did regularly and periodically.

My first morning back in Dallas I went to the nursing home as soon as possible. I wanted to learn as much as I could about my mother’s last day. As I walked from the entrance down the hallway, the administrator, Mrs. Wesley, saw me; she left her office, met me, put her arm around my waist and walked me back to her office. I don’t remember a single word of our conversation in her office. I only remember her warmth, compassion and empathy.

For those of us who work in aging services, we walk this path with so many families as they lose a parent. It is part of the day-to-day tasks in our line of work. May we never allow these events to fall into the category of the ordinary lest we not be ready to share our warmth, compassion and empathy with an adult child who just lost his/her Mama.