Unfortunately, there were technical issues with WordPress yesterday that have since been rectified. Happy belated birthday, Mom.
From my 2020 spiritual memoir written during quarantine, titled Dear John,:
25 April 2020
I was driving back to Jeanerette this morning, looked up at my visor and regarded the St Therese image I have there, and smiled to myself that she’s been pretty quiet lately. I apologized for not saying hello to her as much as I usually do. She proceeded to smile back at me through Theresa the cashier at Mac’s Supermarket and an envelope with the name Theresa and a cardinal on it just as it started to rain on our crawfish boil this afternoon.
She has always been so playful.
Three years ago, coming up on May 10, I was just arriving to my classroom at Westminster Christian where I taught for a single year. The three weeks I thought I had left there—weeks that seemed an eternity to me—would end up being abridged, starting at the moment I received the text from Celeste that would change all of our lives.
Mom was in the hospital. It wasn’t good. I needed to get there immediately.
I quickly and dutifully wrote the day’s directions for my students on the board, alerted my principal to the situation, and was right back in my car headed to New Iberia. I don’t exactly remember my thoughts as I drove. I do know that I probably had some twisted, confused comfort in knowing that I was going to be with my family instead of teaching that day. Despite my love for many of the students and my colleagues, for miscellaneous reasons it had been an extremely stressful year for me.
As the saying goes, I was over it.
That day, the coming days, and the next several weeks would be the most harrowing in our little family’s short history. I would learn what it means to lose a parent, what horrors my father was going through, what it means for my mom and dad to be head-over-heels in love with each other, and ultimately, what it means to wholly and unequivocally depend on God for a miracle.
Fast forward three years, and you have the continuing vestiges of that miracle. You have a day where Mom was actually walking out of the car at Capete and sitting among her children—minus Mich, sadly—to enjoy a crawfish boil. It was once a family tradition to have a Holy Saturday boil out at “the ranch,” as Daddy affectionately calls it. Even after Mama came out of it in June three years ago, we could never have dreamed she would be sitting where she sat today. Heck, the people who are supposed to know these things said, repeatedly and without even a semblance of hope, that she’d never do a lot of things.
And at every step of the way, at every single turn, Mama has proven them wrong.
If Mary’s role is to bring me, as a disciple, face to face with the love of Jesus on the cross, she first did it by bringing me face to face with the love of my crucified mother. I changed because of her cross, and I have been growing in divine love ever since. I don’t always (ever?) feel the love of God the Father or God the Son; but I do know that Heaven’s veil is but a gossamer thread when I lay eyes on my mother now. Perhaps that is simply the next step I have not lived long enough to experience. Perhaps it is that I must first find God before I can find the wife he has in store for me, but in this case I had to first find my mom before I could find God. And I’d like to think this adoration of my mother is the thing Mary has looked upon with her own adoring eyes and favor.
I know the clean-up and crawfish were for Daddy’s birthday, but we all know. Even he knows. The pressing question all day was whether or not Mama would be up for getting dressed and coming out to Capete.
Was she ever. Dressed to the nines, fancy sunglasses and all. I realize that woman’s not an angel, but she should be. For now I’ll just consider her the most beautiful rose in Therese’s heavenly garden.
