Mama's death certificate and a purple and blue giraffe

Sitting at my kitchen table typing, how can I find the joy and wonder of the world with so much missing?

Instead of a letter from Mama here beside my laptop, her death certificate waits in an envelope ready to make it official.

Mama died and won’t come back, but I feel so much love inside of me, bouncing around all over my body like unexplained sunlight at 5 a.m. Like my lithely colored coffee mug of purple and blue giraffes, brown monkeys smiling on top of a wandering tiger all within striking distance of such a tiny sage frog, I keep smiling with my bright Irish green eyes.

As I’ve mentioned to so many of you in conversation, I take much comfort knowing my mother will never leave me. Some people who have never lost a parent or a child may have a hard time understanding this, but it’s true. They never go away. I feel my mother more now as much as when I could call her on the phone or visit her at home. The first time I heard Billy Joe Shaver tell me that, I stood next to him while he played pool before a show in the Zydeco bar in Birmingham. I thought he was nuts, crazier than I’d already imagined.

He walked around shooting pool with one of his band-mates telling me about how he still visits with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, his wife Brenda, his son Eddie and others.

“They’re around me right now,” he said, holding his pool stick in his good hand, the one with all of his fingers still intact.

I thought he was crazy.

After losing my mother, I understand him, which may make me crazy too.

For what it’s worth, I ain’t crazy despite popular consensus.

Speaking to a good friend a few Sundays ago, he told me about letting my future kids know all about Mama. He told me about my ability to keep her spirit alive to others, to keep her unyielding strength, tenacity, and perseverance alive to myself and others. Fortunately, I have a number of videos of my mother and me. I thank Alan Messer more than he’ll ever know for taking a photo of Granny, Mama and me in October 2009, the last photo of Mama smiling with her favorite son and mom. I still feel her hand touching mine the last time I saw her alive.

As long as I remember and tell her story, she continues living. Billy Joe Shaver sings about this in his song, “Live Forever,” whose lyrics I read as part of Mama’s eulogy. All we have to keep us in this life after we die are the memories, thoughts, action, love, and other lasting influences on others.

For Mama’s birthday this year, I drove from the hospital in Meridian where my father had heart surgery across the state to Vicksburg to see her. My gifts to her, I brought Mama a calendar of Ireland, a Sonic bacon cheeseburger, and cut her toenails and rubbed her feet with moisturizing lotion. I felt as close and as loving and loved to her than as I ever had.

My experiences with Mama during her life will continue to carry me for the rest of my life.

God is the roses and the thorns.