Sunrise

“You’re sleeping the day away,” my great grand mother proclaimed as she flipped the light switch on. At 4:30 a.m., possibly the darkest shade of the day, there is no natural  light to warm your face awake. I don’t know where I learned to never argue with my great grandmother as I don’t remember ever trying. When we spent the weekend at Gramony's —Gram for grandma and Ony for Wyonia, her first name-- the days started at dark thirty. Seated at the table as my Gramony pulled hot biscuits out of the oven, I watched the gray out the screen door turn the many hues of dawn that I never saw in the city. I stifled a yawn. The silence was overwhelming and yet comfortable. My Gramony did not feel the need to fill the silence with anything. No lectures, no pep talks, no chastisement, no morning noise which is just how I like my mornings especially at 4:30.

Silent.

It is 5:29 a.m. and the phone is ringing thank the Lord! It is the hospice company calling us back. My four year old son, Ben’s pain meds are not working. He is twisting and writhing in pain. He can’t even lay down. We moved his little bed into our room next to my side of the bed last night. I set an alarm and got up every eleven minutes to push the button to deliver more meds. I glove up and sterilize to push Benadryl and Zofran, one every six and one every 2-4 hours. It didn’t work. We lasted at home less than 12 hours. Part of me wishes we had just stayed at the hospital. But he so wanted to be home. “Mama!” he screams. “Mama, hold me!” he shrieks, stretching out his thin arms for me. For some reason, he still believes after 8 months of battling this disease that I can ease the pain of leukemia somehow. 

I want to tell you something about motherhood. I wrote this for that very purpose. But now I don’t know what to say because the pain is so deep and so wide and so gray that it has consumed my words. It has consumed my stars. I am not a sunrise person. Sunrise had never failed to move me yet when I look up at a cloudless night sky-- that rush of fear mingled with wonder makes me believe like nothing else can. I have sat in a glider nursing a baby through many a sunrise. Some I have seen through tears of frustration or sleep deprived delirium, each ray asking me if today I will let the sun in. Into myself, into my heart, where babies really grow.

And then my little boy died and the gray stayed. I keep waiting for the pinks, the purples, the blues and eventual whites and yellows and they don’t come. I scoff at his belief that I could ease his pain and yet I wish for Gramony’s clothes on the clothesline whipping in the breeze to ease mine. I had a great desire to share my story but each time I tried I couldn’t find the words until I started at 4:30 in the morning.  Born in 1910 in a racist world my great grandmother had grit I could only dream of. As the nurses help us wash and dress my little boy’s body we put his jammies on him and a clean pull up. They tie a tag to his toe and zip him up to his neck in a bag, as we wrap him in a blanket and my husband carries him through the halls of the hospital and to the back of the waiting hearse the silence is overwhelming. We gather our things and wander out to the hospital parking lot our hearts confused about why we are leaving our boy behind. The stars are bright and bitter and they don’t tell my soul a thing. Sunrise comes and I am awake but if it speaks I don’t hear it.

I was twenty when my Gramony died. I was away at college when my Mama called. I went out to the steps of my best friend’s house and looked up at the stars. And I sang.

I was standing

by my window

on a cold and cloudy day

when I saw that hearse come a rollin

oh to carry my mother away

will the circle

be unbroken

by and by Lord by and by

There’s a better home awaiting

in the sky Lord in the sky

And I knew that 1500 miles away my Mama was singing it too. I have learned from trying to tell my story and not being able to until I started at sunrise that motherhood doesn’t start with childbirth and doesn’t end with the death of a child. Maybe the sun doesn’t rise and set on the faith of our fathers but on the grit of our mothers. Maybe the sun will rise someday again and will soften the edges of everything cruel in life. If so I don’t want to be found sleeping the day away.

Maybe someday I will again find the strength to rock a new baby at sunrise. Not soon. As I recently told a friend who understands, I don’t trust God enough to have another baby. But somewhere deep, in the part of me that decides who I want to become I find that the sunrise entices me now. The light that brings understanding and perspective. The warmth that turns a child into a mother and then back into a child again. Somewhere deep and still hidden in me is the grit that scrubbed white womens floors and cooked their food. That  lived through two world wars, the death of her eight year old, the hatred and oppression of her country, and still put on her wig and hat and walked to church every Sunday.  A woman who saw more than 34,000 sunrises. 34,000!  And she chose to see them all. Or at least as many of them as she could. Maybe she knew something that I haven’t learned yet. I guess I’ll start at sunrise.

Listen to Your Mother video of reading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Xg2daEvENA&feature=youtube_gdata_player