On Mom's Day, 2015
Their daddy died a good while ago, so for years, the
three grown boys had only their mom as a living parent.
One had a weekly date with her for lunch. Almost
always from Griff’s Hamburgers. Griff’s was just right down the road, old
Highway 80. She’d rather have a Griff’s hamburger than a $75 steak meal. That’s
what one of the boys said. He meant it too.
Of course the years went by and her grandkids grew and
got older and she grew too, but only older. That’s how it happens.
Couldn’t drive the pickup anymore. But every time one
of the boys came by, the truck seemed to be in a little different spot under
the carport than it had been before. One day a little paint was scraped off,
there by the porch, almost like a truck had barely swiped it, moving really
slow, like maybe pulling back in after backing down the driveway.
“Momma,” one of the boys said.
“Well,” she said, “I won’t do it again.”
A few days later her oldest son put her in his truck
and drove to their property out of town and handed her the keys and he got in
the passenger side. Over the pasture and through some ruts and around in
circles and fast or slow, she drove. Smiled, and drove.
I’d eaten with two of the three brothers the week she
died, back in January. They didn’t mention their mom being sick because they
didn’t think she was. The doctors had her in the hospital for a couple of days
but things had cleared up and it looked like she’d go back to her familiar
house, with the pickup and what she called her other “assets.”
But then things changed really quickly and she found
it hard to breathe and one of the boys called to tell me her condition. And
four hours later he called to say his mom and the mother of his two brothers,
peacefully with them by her bedside, had stopped her labored breathing and
quietly passed away.
Their resourceful mom would have been proud of how the
boys, sport-coat-or-dress-shirt-only churchgoers, handled getting appropriately
outfitted for the funeral. Suits that hadn’t been worn in years were too small.
So were belts. Did somebody have a tie bought in the past 20 years or so?
They started handing down and passing around and mixing
and matching. In a flurry of rural emergency haberdashery, three brothers, a
random son-in-law and a nephew or two were all decked out at a total cost of
one new suit and a belt. At the service, they looked mighty fine. Mrs. Yvonne
had to be smiling.
She had told her trio of sons exactly how the funeral
service would be, when the time came. “And take care of my assets,” she
reminded them. I wasn’t there when she said it, but I imagine it was the same
voice and tone she used when she’d said, “Wash your hands before you come to
this table,” or “Quit fighting and get in there and get to sleep.” They closed
on the house this week and settled the estate, a small one maybe, but one big
enough to raise three boys who knew how to take care of business, mind their
own, and spread the good stuff for years among a family of blood and friends
who stood together and sang the classics that morning on the third day after
her passing.
“Victory in Jesus.” “Because He Lives.” “I Stand
Amazed in the Presence.” Which, if you believe what God says, Mrs. Yvonne was
surely doing that afternoon, for the first time in a long time away from the
gravitational pull of pickups and pastures and Griff’s Hamburgers.
Today, another first. For the first time in 60-plus
years, these three brothers will wake up on a Mother’s Day with no one to wish
a “happy Mother’s Day” to. If it is like that for you, as it is for them, I am
sorry. I really am. If it’s the first or 30th Mom’s Day without your
mother, it must be the same feeling.
My friends will take care of themselves, and their
families, because their mom told them to. To all moms, both alive and gone on,
I guess we sons and daughters are part of your assets, though each of us has
been a liability at times. But as you’d want us to, because of your adult lifetime
investment in us, we will try to take care of ourselves. And of the others
you’ve loved. No way can we do as good a job of it as you did.
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