If Love Could Spin Gold – For My Mother

The head image is one of the only photos I have of my mother.

It sits proudly amongst many others—pictures of my daughters (and a few of their drawings I took the time to frame), pictures of my wife, my grandparents, my close friends. There are hordes of these, but my mother . . . just the one.

It’s not that she wasn’t loved. To me she was “Momma.” To my daughters she was “Gramma.” We had nothing but love for her. But to the world, she was a nobody. I never fully understood what it was that kept her from wanting to experience life to its fullest, but I did everything I could to get her out of her shell. That photo I have of her—for many years, that was the only fruit of my labor.

When my mother was placed into in-home hospice through Medicaid, no one told me. I got a call from a hospice nurse nearly a week into her visitations who said she had found my number on a piece of notebook paper in my mother’s bedside drawer. Was I the one with the daughters my mother always talked to them about—oh, and was I on my way? “No, why would I be?” I asked. I lived in Pennsylvania, she in Tennessee. “She’s only got maybe 48 hours, sweetheart. No one told you?”

Those bitterly short days will stay with me for the rest of my life. I shored up my customer service job for the next few days, got my wife and kiddos in the car, and off we went.

My mother lived in government-assisted housing, primarily survived on Kraft singles sandwiches and the occasional McD’s sweet tea. My mother had more disorders than I could ever hope to keep track of and took more medications than could fit in her ratty old sewing basket. My mother loved horror movies, adult coloring books, and had a borderline-unhealthy obsession with birds.

My mother was my best friend.

I said goodbye to my mother shortly after we arrived. I got to speak with her before the end, which was a blessing. She died on my birthday.

I honored my mother’s final wishes, even though she’d enrolled in insurance only seven months before her death, so they only paid out about $230–100% of what she had paid into it, essentially.

I’m not complaining. We did her right, in the end, and even though the world only saw her as a burden, she was the entire reason I ever got to bear witness to this world. So I made sure her every final wish was realized, no matter the cost.

If you can spare a bit to help my family recoup a little of what we paid to honor my mother, I promise to pay it forward someday when I can afford to do so. My mother never would have dared to start a campaign for personal expenses, but she and I always did see the world differently.

Where she saw judgment and dark shadows, I see the warmth of strangers who know what true burden is, and the light their smiles bring to the world.

Thank you,

Mike

P.S. The second photo is one I found in her closet after she had died. It was taken while she was pregnant with me. Her smile fills me with so much happiness!