Remembering and Honoring My Mother

As the nurse came, she ushered me back to a room where my sister and my grandmother were. They were crying and upset. I just couldn’t figure out why. It all seemed to go in slow motion after that. I was taken to a room where my mother lay with a sheet over her head and it was cold and so sterile looking. I just couldn’t believe that at the ripe old age of nineteen years old, I had lost my best friend. The only person in the world that I could depend on to not judge me and always understood what I was going through.

We had become intensely close because of her health issues. I spent the majority of my time with her and we had some really intimate conversations during those years. I learned so much about her life and about my father who had died when I was only four years old. I learned what made her tick and she learned the same about me. We were inseparable.

She taught me how to enjoy the simple things in life, that money could not buy happiness. She taught me about love and relationships. She taught me how to be a strong willed woman and how to take care of myself. She pushed me to get a college degree and be successful on my own—which I did after she passed away.

Even though my mommy barely had a high school diploma, she was smart about life and knew what it took to be successful and she wanted that for me. She would always tell me “Remember to always be able to take care of yourself.” But she also knew that you had to know how to take care of your man. She would always say, “Take care of your man and he will take care of you ten-fold.” I took all that advice to heart. And to this day, I take those words very seriously.

But what happened during those days after her death, really shaped the way I coped with my mother’s passing. The family fell apart. My sister, who never had a good relationship with my mother, was crying and screaming at the top of her lungs. My grandmother, who was the strongest woman I had ever met in my life, became practically comatose and kept repeating “I should have died first.”