We held the funeral yesterday for my mother. How appropriate that she would pass before Easter and be buried right after. I can’t help thinking of the death and resurrection of Christ in all this. Just before her passing, we could only give her communion with a few little crumbs mixed with whatever the man put in that straw. She was all smiles. And then I remembered later that I had been reading to her out of the Gospel of John, “Whoever eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”
The following is a reprint of something I posted on a forum for those who have kept up with this real life history as it has been unfolding. Sorry if it rambles, but I was just trying to get it all out.
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The funeral was wonderful. There were so many people there who knew the family at different points in our lives, but they had never met one another. And the neat thing is that people who listened to the stories my brother and I told of our mother found their information verified by those who had also known my mother, both in the far distant past and in more recent days. I feel I am beginning to understand my mother a bit better now.
She was a very private lady who endured a lot of suffering, yet she made so many rich. She was so funny….she was a strict tither. My brother David said that he figured out her tithe to be something like $18.36 and suggested she might round it up to $20. She said no — to send exactly $18.36. She tithed even when she didn’t have anything hardly to tithe. In fact, she told David to send her tiny tithe back to her little church, and then she said, “And you had better do it!” On top of that, she wrote all her private notes in coded shorthand, as I said earlier. She even kept her checkbook in shorthand. So she told my brother to balance her checkbook and he said, “I can’t! It’s all in shorthand. What’s this number here?” She told him it was an eight and then said, “Oh, no…I think it’s a zero.” I’m telling you, they broke the mold when they made her.
Between all the stories about her, it came out just how many people she tried to help. Her church friends had to noise everything around the apartment complexes and storefront where my mother socialized just to reach everyone who knew her. (Some don’t read the obits.) One little lady came to the funeral in a walker — the first time she’d been out of the house in six weeks. She said my mother had been taking care of her before she came to be with us at Christmas. She had teased her about being pregnant because her tummy was distended and now she felt so bad…but I reassured her that it was all okay.
Someone told the story of how my mother had taken in another woman whom she referred to as “Madame X” for many years — always requesting prayer for her at church. “Madame X” is a mentally-off woman who my mother let live with her the last months she was in San Antonio. There were many people who called my mother up at all hours of the day and night. One of her church lady friends asked her how she was going to get any sleep and my mother told her, “The Lord will provide rest.” I can’t say that in all of this heroic effort on my mother’s part that we were any too thrilled. We worried about her all the time, but she insisted that she was ministering to these people. A lot of them wouldn’t or couldn’t help themselves — maybe they were so emotionally messed up that they were unable to make rational decisions. But here is where I learned something.
If my mother had had children at home, her endeavors would have been irresponsible. However, it was her choice as a widow, to live like this. She confided in a friend how lonely she was, yet this was her choice. But it was something else I remembered talking to God about that helped me make sense of all this. My mother had a way of never doing responsible things in a timely manner. I think one reason was that she was in “escape” mode a lot of the time. Sometimes when there is so much suffering in your life, it’s just easier to escape by helping others while neglecting your family. I think a lot of people do that.
I won’t even go into all the examples of her lack of common sense in caring for her own. But I will drive at a principle I never saw so clearly before. In my own life, I had learned the hard way that the Lord would not allow me to be slack about responsibility. Yet, no matter how oblivious my mother was to the nuts and bolts of living, He always seemed to take care of her. She would say, “I’m trusting God,” much the way someone might close their eyes to walk across the street in the middle of oncoming traffic. Yet, God would let her get away with this stuff. I asked Him why that was after I noticed the pattern.
I realize now that God doesn’t require the same from all of us. I don’t know why He doesn’t, but He doesn’t. You would think that if you bashed someone across the head with a two-by-four, they’d see the light, but some people never do. I came to realize that, for whatever reason, my mother was just wired differently than other people. I gave up (and so did the rest of the family) on getting her to get out of bed before noon, be packed on moving day, show up for appointments within an hour of the time she should be there. (When I was in high school, she regularly made me wait for two hours before she picked me up even though she didn’t work outside the home.) It was incredibly exasperating, but I couldn’t spend the rest of my life exasperated.
My mother gave God that part that she knew how to do and it didn’t matter if it made any sense to anyone else. She was utterly sincere in all that she did. What, to others, seemed like a waste of time helping people who whiney-babied their way through life was her way of wasting herself on God. I never saw that before, because I have always been results oriented. I don’t like to waste my time with an idiot when, for one-tenth of the time, I can help five others who will see a real change in their lives. But you know what? Even idiots need someone to love them. Jesus loved a lot of hurting idiots when He walked the earth. (Some people really don’t SEE their problem even though it’s clear to others.)
He also loved people who wasted their lives on God — like the woman with the alabaster box. (What a good way to waste your life!) My mother was a process person — I mean she loved the process for itself. (Yes, you could say she was co-dependent, too.) But who knows but what some of these people who wanted nothing more than a sounding board found themselves loved in a way that nobody but Jesus could have endured? Some of them may have gone away unchanged, but God may yet use the time they spent with my mother to speak to their hearts. I know there were a few who actually learned a lot about God from her and began to have a relationship with Him. This has had the effect of making me value the process a lot more and to stop seeing lack of results as an utter failure on my part.
Now you will love this, but just before the funeral I was asked to select three songs to be played from a CD. I chose “Abide With Me,” “Ave Maria,” and “The Lord’s Prayer.” I don’t know why I chose “Ave Maria” — I mean I love it and almost didn’t have the guts to choose it, given my mother’s feelings about Catholic prayer. But I said what the heck….she would have expected her “loose cannon” daughter to slip something in. The more I thought on it, the more I saw the trail of all the saints who have preceded us and wasted their lives on Christ in their own various and sundry ways. Mary was the first to say “yes” when she took on herself the glory and the stigma of becoming the Mother of Our Lord. The fruit of her womb was blessed far above that of any woman who preceded or succeeded her as a mother. Every saint who has ever loved God has gone through a series of costly “yesses”. My mother did and she certainly endured incredible heartbreak, disappointment, anger, bitterness, betrayal, and rejection. And the dear lady who came in her walker is a beautiful Catholic who lost her primary caregiver — her own son — about a year ago. I realized later that the song was probably for her. My mother walked her path with her when she lost her son. My mother walked with a lot of people just the way that Jesus does.
I also saw something else. Many of us have come out of the churches and gone through a number of phases doing it. I actually feel that many of us have gone so far trying to find freedom and authenticity that we have crossed into a sort of nebulous existence trying to figure out what we are supposed to be doing. A few years ago I was poisoned by my church experience — I had “escaped Babylon”. And yet, some time later, I saw that Babylon was in me. I wandered “outside the camp” to be with Jesus… and yet, my mother went to the same church (I/C) that I did and experienced Jesus. I saw that following the Lord “outside the camp,” “escaping Babylon,” etc. is all a matter of heart. God allows the rise and fall of I/Cs just like He allows the rise and fall of Dairy Queens. They are just STUFF in our lives that He uses. My mother simply followed Jesus outside the camp but inside the I/C.
My mother did some unconventional things in her little I/C (and she was lucky not to be given the left foot of fellowship). She actually opposed some of the things they tried to do and did it in such a way that she changed THEM. Wow. Like my brother said — even when she told people off, she often did it in such a nice way that they liked her. (Yours truly does not possess these skills.) But the fact is, she was “outside the camp” with Jesus even though she was inside the I/C. Even though she did some churchy things and followed the forms of church, her life was driven by the Light — not by the I/C. I/C was just the setting where the action took place.
One other thing I must note. My brother just came to my apartment and mentioned getting something my mother wrote published. I didn’t realize it until after she died — but she wrote many, many letters to her great-grandson, Tripp. She wrote him every single week. His mother saved every one of those letters from her grandma. In every letter my mother would write something about how big he was getting and tell how far along she was knitting a blanket for him. She would say how much she loved him and how much she prayed for him. She told him how much God loves him and what a fine young man she is praying that God will make him. Several women have read these letters and wept because they are so lovely and beautiful.
I never thought my mother would have a book out before me. I thought of “The Shack” for a moment. Someone told me it took my mother a year to write all those. I said, no — it took her about 75-77 years to write it all. It is packed so full of love, hope, and joy, that no novice could ever have sat down and written it off the top of her head. I told David that I get to write the forward….Gosh, some see it purely as a sentimental Oprah-Winfrey thing and others are going to see the depths. I have a feeling no two people will come away with the same impression…maybe it’s one of those things that you read in your 20’s and think you “see” and then you read it in your 50’s and realize you had no idea how many levels it had.
At the funeral, one of my cousins remarked about a word someone used — “legacy”. She felt that my mother had carried the legacy of our grandmother, another incredible woman that we didn’t appreciate as her up-close family. I thought about my mother and how different we are. Also about my necklace on order with a thumbprint from her. Her hands were always so warm and healing when she prayed. It occurred to me that she had handed me a baton as her mother handed her. She is an example to us all to serve wherever we are, not to be frustrated with the process, and never to think that our part is not very important even if all we do is pray in our “closet”. My mother was part and parcel to numerous miracles and conversions as well as the boring process of day-to-day putting up with people. She was also instrumental in holding others up so they wouldn’t fall. I feel as if God has given me a small peek behind the veil and I really, really, really see now why we should never be discouraged in this walk again.
Thank you all for sharing this amazing journey with me.
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