Mom

I lost my mom on this date three years ago.

She packed who-knows-how-many sandwiches for me over the years. They were good sandwiches because, as she told me, she was packing them for a child of the King. After a while mom began to include a handwritten Bible verse with each lunch. Spiritual food to supplement the physical.

She sneezed the world’s second-loudest sneeze. You could hear her in the neighbor’s yard.

When I was very little she did not yet have her driver’s license, but needed to bicycle to get places. Once she got her license, she used her newfound mobility to occasionally help older people with their shopping. She would make Dad pick up people with no transportation and give them rides to church. Sometimes the ’56 Ford was crowded. She felt deprived because she had no middle name, and so invented one for herself. Never consulted the government, but it still appears on several official documents.

Raised as a Quaker she opposed violence, but yielded to my dad’s preference that his young sons be allowed to have toy guns and play Good Guys and Bad Guys. Pitman was safer because we were armed. She knew that even Quakers were not always as non-violent as they let on: “A Quaker farmer awoke in the night to hear a prowler in the house. He picked up his rifle and confronted the intruder: ‘Now I wouldn’t want to hurt thee, and I wouldn’t wish to harm thee. But thee is standing where I am about to shoot.’”

I’ll never hear her tell that story again.

But these and a thousand other memories remain in my mind, so in a sense I haven’t lost her at all. Even more important is the promise, “The dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. So we will be with the Lord forever.” Our separation, then, is only temporary. But it is still separation—a reminder for us to value, love, spend time with, listen to, understand, and help our living loved ones while they are still with us.