Not dead yet

I called the office of my mom’s Yazoo City doctor and heard something that stung.

“We thought she was dead,” the woman at the office told me.

Waiting a few seconds to let her sentence process, I cleared up her misinformation.

“She’s definitely alive,” I said. “I’ll give her phone number and you can discuss this with her.”

The woman didn’t apologize for telling me on the phone that she thought my mom was dead. What if I hadn’t spoken with my mom in recently? What if she really was dead?

I called Mama at her hospital room in Vicksburg a few minutes later just to make sure she wasn’t dead and didn’t get an answer. I waited about an hour and called back. It turns out she went to have a CAT Scan. I asked how she was doing.

“I have a headache and my back hurts,” she said.

“You’re not dead, are you?” I said, telling her about the conversation with the woman at her doctor’s office.

“I’ve got a long ways to go, but I’m far from dead,” she said.

Sometimes when we get into a rut in life, we might get depressed and feel like we might as well be dead. However, the greatest thing about life is the ability to find redemption and crawl out of our self-inflicted graves and show the world how alive we are.

My mom isn’t dead. I can tell she’s doing much better since she has started arguing with me again.

Running five miles yesterday made me feel alive again too. Through the years, I’ve been in situations where it seemed like people thought I wouldn’t keep going. After a car wreck where I almost lost my life to a mobile home hauled by an 18-wheeler slicing through my driver’s side of my car, I took note of how easily life can slip through our hands. I dropped out of college for a little while to regroup, get my life together. I remember a few people telling me that I wouldn’t finish school after taking a break.

Last year, Starkville’s chief “economic development” official told me multiple times that I “wasn’t competent” to put together the third annual Johnny Cash Flower Pickin’ Festival, never mind the two prior successful years under my leadership. He didn’t commit staff or encourage volunteers to help with the event or even attend any part of it.

I felt a little redemption when the preacher for the Sunday Redemption Service asked where Starkville was during the festival celebrating the pardoning of Johnny Cash, the pardoning of Starkville, forgiveness.

We all need a pardon every now and then.

Just to clear the record, my mama ain’t dead yet, and neither am I. We have a lot of fight left in us.