It’s in the queue for salads at our country church’s picnic, that’s the first time I have seen Mama since she told me on the phone.
“Hey Mama.” I lean over her shoulder, let the words gently tap.
She turns my way, smiles from under her khaki bucket hat. “Hey, girl.”
I wish my hands weren’t full of plate heaped with three bean salad. To cup that brave, dear face in hands. Mama. I hold her with my eyes. She looks… tired. But she sounds better than she did Thursday on the phone.
She’d left a message first, words only a bit flat, chopped a tad too short. Later, I would remember that.
I had called her back, receiver between neck and ear, while I made dinner, minced the garlic, buttered the split loaves. I made small talk. About the possibility of a new ladies’ ministry in our faith community, about some creative ideas a few women and I prayed over at the meeting she had missed. She said little and when she did, the words staccatoed, edgy, abrupt.
“You okay, Mama?” I had whispered, laid down my buttered knife.
“No.” The silence on the line filled with tears. Oh Mama… Loneliness? Fears?
Tears lubricated and finally the words slipped out. “I went to the doctor’s today.”
An unexpected turn. I had closed my eyes, waited, braced.
And then in a fluster, a flurry, “Oh, he says I have diabetes.”
I exhale.
“It’s just that Grandma….” Mama’s words break up in the sadness.
Yes, Grandma…. Grandma Ruth, that little old lady I loved fiercely, Mama even more so, had had diabetes my whole life, every day stabbing herself for a dab of blood, everyday checking her blood sugar levels, every day slamming cupboards over menu plans, every day huffing over the unfairness of this disease that she felt drew heavy boundary lines all around her life.
“I don’t want to be like Grandma.” Mama chokes out the words. “So angry about diabetes.”
“We only loved her more dearly.” I can feel the soft wrinkles of her arms, pressed against mine, when we went for a walk, the way she rummaged through her purse for a stick of Trident.
Mama looks a bit like her, standing here in the line-up for a medley of potato, pastas and bean salads.
Has she started the medication yet? Talked to the diabetic nurse that runs the community support group? Began the dietary restriction? I don’t look down at her plate. And I don’t ask those questions. In front of a jello salad, I only look in her eyes and ask the one thing that matters. “How can I stand beside you through this, Mama?”
And she looks me straight through and cuts it all back.
“Just help me find the joy.”
Lord, just help me find the joy,
You here
How could I help others find the joy,
You here?
Photo of Mama, by daughter and budding shutter bug, Hope Voskamp, used with permission
