It was, I think, our last gift from God.
She was going downhill fast, virtually bedridden even though she tried to get up. Most of the time she just couldn't. It had been that way for days. She slept alot and when she did wake up, sometimes she just didn't have the strength to talk so she'd mouthe the words "I love you" and drift back asleep. The rare times she could talk, the medicine wouldn't let her make much sense. And then Friday came.
Around lunch time on Friday, Mama "woke up". She sat up in bed, wide awake, alert, asking questions, then correcting us when we answered them wrong! She began laughing over things she'd heard us say in the last few days when we thought she was unconscious and oblivious. Then she said, "I'm going to the kitchen!" and this shell of the woman she once was got up and walked to the kitchen.
I called all her grandchildren and told them to come back as fast as they could, and they did, and for the next three hours we talked and laughed, and I held her wooden bread bowl in her lap as she kneaded the dough for one last pan of biscuits. She sat in her kitchen (where she'd spent the majority of her life) and cut up with us like she did before she ever got sick. We couldn't know that in less than seventy-two hours, she'd be gone.
For the rest of the world, it was just another Friday. For us, it was one last afternoon with Mama.
Thanks God.
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