The Heart of the Family
So here we are. To our great surprise. It has felt like an earthquake at the foundation. The ground is suddenly unstable. I wonder if the core, that makes us who we are, remains even as so much else changes. I suppose you have to have faith and hope in yourself and each other. Not for a moment do we underestimate the impact and the difficulty of this experience. Not today, tomorrow, next month, or years from now.
What happens to a family when it loses its’ heart.
There’s always a moment in any family when you feel in full bloom. Alive. Loved. Delighted. Ultimately, you recognize that you risk disappointment and hurt every time you love. You love anyway. And, if you’re lucky, you become a familiar story of an inter-weaving theme – family and love. Mom had our faces on every page of her life. She carried our hearts with her wherever she went, in her heart. I think she forgot what it was like not to parent or love us.
Mom used to move from house to house, whenever her relatives made her mad or displeased her. And, yet her mother left her in Alabama and moved to Cleveland without her. Her grandmother, whom she called, “Ma Dear,” came back to Birmingham to get her. She rarely talked about her life growing up.
As a young girl, Mom taught herself to look at the roads that lay ahead, and those roads she had already traveled. She was a compromise of her stranger qualities; better remembered for her serious conversations and penchant for gossip. She was compassionate and generous, simultaneously opinionated and open-minded; iron-willed and fiercely independent.
Mom could be brutally honest and at the same time nurture honesty. Listening to a sermon by a pastoral candidate, she fell asleep, waking up a few minutes later. She had never slept through a sermon. On the pastoral candidate’s evaluation form, she wrote: “He puts me to sleep! That wasn’t a bad thing, though — my nap was nice.”
One of the most defining moments of Mom’s life happened in 1953. High school students took a bus trip to Alabama; the riders on the bus were all white except for three black students. The students were on their way to a voter registration drive as part of an inter-denomination effort around voters’ rights in the wake of the growing civil rights movement in the South.
The “Church” had resolved to act. The bus was attacked — windows shattered and bodies violently rocked. White students didn’t allow the black students to be taken off of the bus. Eventually, help arrived and the students continued their journey. One of the black students was Mom. I think those moments defined who she was and who she wanted to be; what she wanted and how she wanted to live.
Tenia tells the story of grandma watching an Oprah segment on dysfunctional families and its admonishment for parents to tell their children they were loved. Immediately, Grandma decided to change the trajectory of dysfunction in her own family. Before you knew it, “I love you was being spoken out loud, a lot! Hugs and kisses were coming fast and furious. It was the strangest thing. Grandma lasted for about two weeks. Tenia said it was uncomfortable and maddening because love didn’t have to speak its’ name in her house — it lived there.
Mom has loved us in all the many ways we have been. She has loved the things connected to us. She was our point of origin and return. It seems to me now and still in memory that she thought we were a treasure worth preserving and protecting. Like the daises she gently and carefully planted, reaching into the ground, digging deep and patting them firmly into place.
The last night of Mom’s life was spent with family — laughing, talking, teasing each other and being teased while sharing a late meal together. Wherever, we have gone from that night, a part of us has stayed rooted in that patch of earth.
It continues to be my hope and prayer that we be what Mom has spent a lifetime teaching us to be — loving, caring and honest with each other. To be family. Our last gift is to show her we learned our lessons well.
—Joella Coles