Spencer's Mom

Except a kernel of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

The Last Escape

New mom

 

My eyes snapped open as I heard the soft creak of the stairs, the gentle whoosh of the front door, then a few minutes later, an engine turn over. As it idled for a minute, my husband rolled over next to me.

“Why does she do that?” he asked in a half-asleep voice.

I smiled as I heard my mother back carefully out of the driveway. “She hates good-byes.” I waited until I could hear the Toyota pushing off into the still dark night no more, then turned over and went back to sleep. That was around 2006.

            On December 17th 2017, she skipped out on her last goodbye, with a swift downward spiral that hailed a trip to a local ER. When the phone rang just before midnight at my brother’s house, he assumed it was an update. But she was gone, like a night bird, swooping high into the midnight sky.; escaped from the ancient tent that kept her bound. And no goodbye.

            My mother was never easy, but once you accepted who she was, it made your life, well not easy, but better. Quirky, defiant, stubborn and often withdrawn, but yet so fierce in her love for her children, she was a study in opposites. She was soft as a southern teacake – surrounded by barbed wire. We tried, all of us, over our adult years to bend and shape her into a more ordinary mom – enticing her into classes or retreats, even bus tours. And how about book clubs, or the senior center? But she ignored us, usually withdrawing further into her New York Times crossword puzzle or a solitary bench in a musty library, a pile of books beside her.

            We were different. She was brilliant, wary of the world before her and unsettled until she could piece it all apart and diagnose it. She hated laziness and stupidity, especially together, and was blunt and condescending in her opinions. I was more like my dad – simple minded, naive enough to step boldly into quicksand, then fast enough to scuttle out. I was a peacemaker; she wielded a sword. I let go, she held fast to any grudges she could gather.

            As she aged, her world grew smaller, but the possibilities for catastrophe loomed large. Anxiety grew as her mind slipped away, replaced by copious Post-It notes dotting her walls and cabinets. Then a major artery in the left frontal lobe went. The next year, one on the right blew, and we had a brand new mom before us. The intellect, and the fear attached to it, was completely erased. The New Mom laughed a lot, painted her nails with White Out, ate napkins and would tickle you if you stood close enough.

            “How are you doing?” I asked my brother Bob last week.

            “I’m not sure who I miss the most,” he said. “The Old Mom or the New Mom.”

            The New Mom lasted a lot longer than we thought she would. We assumed one more stroke would take her quickly but instead she declined slowly in a sweet little nursing home overlooking the Hudson River. You would find her in a wheel chair, sometimes wiping the fingers of her baby doll and kissing them one by one. In 2011, as I came around the corner and met her eyes, I said goodbye to the last remnant of the mom who loved me. She no longer knew who I was.

            At the funeral, I was transfixed by an old black and white photo of a young woman, her mahogany hair long and messy, clothes hanging loose on her thin frame with the knee highs pulled up on her skinny white legs. My grandfather put this frail young girl on a train back when deep South meant a whole different country and sent her towards her dreams; graduate school, Columbia University, New York City. I think he knew that the little redhead who survived encephalitis at age five was much tougher than she looked. Her smile is wide but slightly pensive. She is looking at her future husband holding the camera, with guarded hope. This is the mom I never knew. By the time we could talk face-to-face, that hope had morphed to a droll cynicism and her courage had hardened to defiance. Like me, she had buried a son, and reached out to grasp the hand of a God she took years to come to terms with, surrendering in fragments and pieces. Ironically, the child that gave her the most trouble, (that would be ME) showed her the way to grace, to a Jesus who was bigger than a book or a class in theology, a Jesus who would love her tenaciously yet tenderly in her loneliness and fear. After I lost Spencer in 2002, she became an outright evangelist. “Let me tell you about my grandson who loved Jesus,” she would begin.

            Mama was an amazing cook, seamstress and a natural beauty too but she never taught me a dang thing except how to make the best southern biscuits in Dixie. You better handle that dough like it’s a newborn. Maybe if I’d stuck around past age 15 I would’ve picked up some things, but I doubt it. I did share her overall disinterest in all things material and domestic. I think we were both hippies before they were invented.

            “Nothing in my house matches,” I told my granddaughter Brooklynn recently, as she nodded in agreement. “It’s wonderful! You don’t have to worry if something breaks!” We laughed together, and then I added almost secretively, “Some people have matching everything!”

            She gave me a sweet smile and said, “Ama, I think MOST people have matching everything.” And we laughed at the craziness of that, and of her grandmother too.

            They say daughters invariably become their mothers. That thought would’ve made me cringe 40 years ago, but now I like it, most the time. And when I don’t ( my siblings and I have coined a new adjective for it: being “martha-ish”) I just ask Jesus to pull away the barbed wire and give me His love instead.

            After I got the call that my mother died, I lay down on the couch in the quiet house and cried. I will miss her; the old mom, the new mom and that gutsy redhead alone on a train. But as I stared out at the moonlit night, I suddenly saw her running, and laughing. It was a mom I never knew! She was free and she had some people to see. And I waited until I could hear her laughter no more, until the night turned silent again. No more goodbyes, sweet mommy. Then I climbed back into bed and fell asleep.

 

Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Psalm 124:7

 

More Precious than Diamonds

 

But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. 1 Corinthians 2:9

As soon as my left hand grabbed the hot coffee cup I knew something wasn’t right. Maybe it was the subtle weight of the ring, or the familiar sparkle. Whatever it was, it was not there. Instead, I stared in awe at the four prongs jutting out from the ring next to my wedding band, now empty handed, revealing the gray tarnished white gold normally hidden beneath a diamond. Erin, my daughter-in-law, who was passing me the coffee as we sat at the Starbucks drive-up, caught my stare and followed it to the ring.

We didn’t say much. I think she was watching me more than the empty ring, waiting for my response to cue hers. We’ve heard of this kind of thing, how girls can be about their diamonds – reduced to rubble, humiliating ourselves to hands and knees in the dairy aisle of Stop and Shop (yes, I knew someone who did this. The diamond was not found). But somehow I just knew this was it. I would look for it, back-tracking through a large art museum, a parking lot made of tar with crushed glittery stones in it (I had to laugh when I saw it) and a restaurant. When we got home, we combed through the car, my pocketbook, the house. I couldn’t remember really seeing it last. But it was gone, the stone my husband had held out when he proposed to me, the diamond that had belonged to his grandmother, a large 2 carat plus stone that had survived three generations. Sorry Gram.

I’ve never been a “diamond” kind-of girl. I have to confess this so I don’t look like I’m trying to come across as Mother Theresa. I was a hippie before there were hippies. My mom said her side of the family was always kind of dreamy, crossing the Atlantic from Scotland in the 1700’s in pursuit of… dreams. The Murray clan settled on Edisto Island in South Carolina and became planters, prospering almost effortlessly through a windfall of fine cotton, Sea Island cotton, which was exported to France. We were never rich, like some planters, but we were known as being kind and fair. The theory is we were too dreamy, not quite as tethered to material gain as others. This explained why mom seemed to spend most of our childhood drinking coffee and staring out of the kitchen window, a Parliament slowly burning in an ashtray beside her. The house was clean and so were we, but she took little notice of furniture, drapes and jewelry. I never once heard her say she wanted something material. Her mind was elsewhere. And I grew up the same.

I always tell people, if you want someone to notice your new furniture, don’t ask me over. I might notice a month or two later that something looks a little different, but I just can’t put my finger on it. So when my husband gave me this oversized diamond, I really didn’t notice. The next day, I was excitedly telling a friend that I was engaged when she grabbed my hand and started screaming, “Oh my GOD!” This would be the first of many such embarrassing times for me. Like I said, it’s just not me.

When Erin and I had finished looking in the car, I asked her to pray with me and we asked God to take over the search. It’s His diamond, if He wants me to get it back, He has the means. A beautiful peace seemed to fill her living room, and she said, “Our treasures are in heaven, right?” which made me really happy because this girl is getting it. And that is so much more valuable than any earthly jewel.

I can’t even begin to imagine what heavenly treasure will look like. Somehow I don’t think it will be jewels as we know them, although certainly heaven will trump any crown or palace here. Streets of gold? Why not? But my guess is at least part of that heavenly treasure will come in the form of seeing loved ones there, or perhaps a stranger will say, “I was in your Sunday School class” or “I’m a friend of Erin’s” or “you told me about Jesus one day in an airport,” and God’s inconceivable plan of love and redemption will begin to unfold and spill over before our eyes, more glorious that a fountain of pure gold. There is simply nothing on earth to compare with His glory.

My wedding band is white gold and on the inside we had inscribed, “CB and Robin / 10-11-97 / Jesus is Lord” It’s alone on my ring finger now and I admit at first it felt a little strange without the big rock next to it. I made my husband promise he would not get me another diamond. I like just the band, the simplicity of its message, that after 15 years, we can still say, “Jesus is Lord.” When I called my husband up from North Carolina to tell him that the diamond was lost, he said, “We have Jesus, we have everything we need.” Dreams on earth, treasure in heaven, and a family around me that understands, that gets it. Everything we need, all that I want.

 

The Secret Path

The email subject simply said “Thanks for sharing”. It was from a father who lost his two year old son last February and I eagerly read the text that followed. He shared briefly his circumstances, then left a link to an audio of his son’s funeral, urging me to listen. I went home and clicked on, profoundly moved by what I heard.

The father spoke first. I was not only touched by his words, but I immediately noticed the edge in his voice. The sorrow and agony wove through his words, and I remembered the peculiar dominion and freedom that comes with such devastation. We know there is nothing left to lose and having thrown our broken souls upon the Rock of ages, having severed the last cords from all earthly moorings, we are strangely buoyed by an unseen Force that we can neither feel at the time nor understand but His presence is unmistakable. When a person is surrendered to God’s will at this time, there is clarity to the world around you. You see things as they really are, with all the small petty things of life sifted out and you become a mouthpiece for God, a yielded vessel in the purest sense. It is transforming.

This morning I read from Isaiah, “I have chosen you out of the furnace of affliction” and I thought, How strange that You would not only find us in that place but even lead us there; to a furnace, or a desert or the wilderness. Yet He promises, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” I remember so clearly how black the darkness became after my son died. It was the type of black that makes you unsure of your next step, of the air around you, even unsure of up and down; there is nothing familiar. I knew that God was there, His words were behind me, guiding me, His arm was beneath me, and I also knew that everywhere I would go, that Jesus was before me. I was still scared, sometimes terrified, but these things I knew to be true.

In a vivid dream I had in those early days, Jesus was running. I know we don’t know what he looked like but it was him in my dream and he was running fast like you do when there is something dangerous and you are trying to save someone. He had a look of great focus and compassion on his face. And in the dream God told me he was running to catch a girl who was falling. And the girl was me.

I can’t stop thinking of the father of this beautiful little boy who drowned, of the painful march through the year; birthdays, holidays, looking for the laughter, the little steps, reaching out to hold…nothing. Yet in listening to the funeral, the father’s voice so broken but with a familiar strength, I know they will not only be okay, but they will be blessed beyond measure. In God’s peculiar economy, the letting go of everything allows us to receive His “all in all”. The path, so dark to begin with, becomes illuminated as we climb higher in to His glory and we are hidden in the cleft of the rock, where we see things too marvelous for words.

He wrote specifically to say that he and his wife also find comfort from the words of Samuel Rutherford, a 17th century preacher, and Amy Carmichael, a missionary to India. (See Resources on the HOPE page). The following poem is one he found written by Amy Carmichael, who suffered many years while serving in India. I’ll end here. May you find the Secret Path.

 

WITHERED LAWN

(by Amy Carmichal & based on John 4: 14)

 

“Shall never thirst” —My God, what does it mean?

My wells of joy are dried up, and the dawn of this strange day discovers all my lawn, that yesterday lay green, A stretch of withered grass; and the white may that bordered it is gone.

My desolate day lengthens to weeks; will the long weeks be years? Henceforth must only tears suffice me? “Never thirst!” Are the words mockery, framed to ensnare? Nay, God be true though my own heart be liar! When was He ever a wilderness to me? As waters that fail? Thou pricking, stinging brier, false stabbing thought–go trail thy venomous thorns elsewhere! O God, my Father, help me.

Thus he spoke–the man whose heart God broke, but broke in pitifulness. Though by a stroke He took the dear desire of his eyes, it was but to surprise him with greater Love. For far more full of incommunicable delights, the fountain on the heights, than wayside pool, however sweet with fringing flower and fern; and those who learn the secret path that to the fountain goes, whence comfort flows, would tread it ever. But just then, of this only the border of the coming bliss was shown to him — as in the desolate dawn Father and son in a new union, one, walked hand in hand across the withered lawn.