Mama, did you grieve?

 

(Mama’s kids, the day of her funeral, January 2011.  Our oldest sister is missing from the photo.  She went to heaven before Mama.  My youngest brother, mentioned in the post below, is standing next to me on the right.We are lined up by age.)

I wish Mama had been able to share her feelings with me.

What were you feeling Mama, the day my brother and his wife and your two little red-haired granddaughters boarded the plane, and flew across the world to serve as missionaries to Ethiopia?

I wish Mama had told me then if she was afraid, proud, happy, sad, or did she grieve?

Mama, was there part of you that grieved?

After Mama fell and broke her hip a year ago last November, everything medically spiraled downhill for her.

We didn’t know if she was going to make it, so we contacted my brother in Africa.

We didn’t tell Mama.

She would have been upset at us bothering him.

When he walked into her hospital room, Mama burst into tears, called out his name and said,

“Oh, you’re just as handsome as ever!”

Suddenly, she was just a mama with her little boy, the baby of the family,

and it meant the world to her to have him there with her.

She must have grieved the day they all flew so far away,

grief and pride all mixed up in a confusing package.

When she died, we found all the newsletters, the emails, the correspondence from Africa,

first from Ethiopia, then Rwanda, then Uganda as their ministry moved them around the continent.

In six days, my own little girl, her husband, and my two grandbabies, board a plane to Ghana, Africa,

My emotions are a confusing package of grief and pride.

I wish my Mama was here.

I think she would understand how I feel.

 

Still following,

Elizabeth