My precious grandmother is with Jesus now. I've been so sad and there just aren't words when you lose your last grandparent. I think the loss is harder as an adult than it was as a child.
Mammaw was one of a kind. She was spirited, feisty, funny, and loved to overindulge those she called her own. She was absolutely not what anyone expected a pastor’s wife to be.
Spoiler alert: She loved every soap opera known to man. I think she’d say, “The Young and the Restless” was the best.
When I was a toddler, Mammaw lost her first husband tragically to a heart attack. When she moved into a much smaller home, I remember she kept a basket with colored knee highs next to her door. It made visiting her fun, and I could pick whichever “look” I wanted every time I visited. She knew how to bring color to ordinary life, and she did it well.
When I was older, all of my friends had candy cigarettes and my parents had firmly said no. Mammaw snuck me a pack next time I visited her. No one told her grand babies no.
When she married my step grandfather, they moved away, and I looked forward to the weeks when she would fly down and stay with us all week. One time, during a particularly hot summer day, I talked her into walking down Hwy 63 to the nearest movie store a quarter of a mile away. She rented a movie for us that I told her my parents didn’t want us to watch. No one told her grand babies no. I still remember my mom’s face when she walked into the house and heard what we had done. I think I was six.
To my delight, when her husband retired from the ministry, they moved down to Moss Point, and I was able to see her often again. I had access to a huge library in their home, and she’d give me money to walk down to Burnham’s and get chili cheeseburgers for lunch. We’d watch I Love Lucy reruns together while we ate.
When I was a teenager, Mammaw offered to buy me the cute crop tops that my dad would have flipped over. She told me I had a cute tummy, and if my parents kicked me out that I could move in with her. I considered it. I mean, she never told me no.
At the same time, Mammaw kept a little cartoon taped beside her computer monitor that said, "I want to be so full of Christ that if a mosquito bites me it flies away singing there’s power in the blood.” I watched as she lived a life of service to her husband and church. When her aging mother needed total care, she just moved her in and took care of her until the end. When her husband’s health declined, she cared for him in the same way too. She was loyal, and her faith was tough. Her prayers were too.
Mammaw and I were lifelong pen pals until dementia took her mind and her ability to communicate. Before then, most of her letters and eventually emails ended with, “God is GOOD. Love you, Mammaw.”
How do you write a farewell eulogy on such a complicated personality? She was larger than life but content to make her days sitting in front of her computer emailing friends and family or sitting in her recliner holding great-grandchildren. She was a marvel at remembering every single holiday known to man and remembering to drop a card or a gift in the mail to celebrate each and every one. Every single holiday feels emptier without her part of it.
Mammaw loved candy corn, Vera Bradley purses, trips to eat Mexican food at Coco Loco’s, a new outfit from Talbots, and whatever hateful stray cat she could take in. I swear she could only adopt the meanest cats.
She once had the fattest cat you have ever seen named Biscuit. She had overfed it to the point that when you walked in her front door it would start hissing and rolling at the same time. You couldn’t help but choke back laughter. Gosh, Mammaw loved to overindulge.
I think that’s what makes her passing all the harder. We’ve been grieving for two years over the dementia that claimed the soul we knew as our own. This final goodbye is all the sadder, because it came so slowly without the grace such a life deserved. This is not the end. No, it is her beginning, because a Christian’s death means eternal life is beginning. The old is being made new. Death is being undone.
”They say grief is love;
Love bewildered, love stopped short of its destination.
Where does grief go for people of resurrection?
It cannot rest in empty words;
It will not abide pithy platitudes.
You try to prepare for it
But nothing prepares you for a missing face in photos
Or when they don’t come waving out from the barn.
There is no hardening to such an absence –
Carved out, hollowed deep.
Even hope-filled hollows hurt.
Even resurrection requires death.
Even Jesus wept at the tomb.
So to grieve with hope
A love with nowhere to go
Must meet the love that will not let us go,
And there, so slowly,
The grieving heart
Finds final home.”
“They Say Grief is Love”: Phylicia Masonheimer
Until we meet again, my precious Mammaw. Thank you for loving my kids and me well.
Anna Cirlot is a Gulf Coast photographer specializing in family photography. She loves capturing the beauty in the great outdoors for adventurous, kind-hearted families. Anna is married to her high school sweetheart, and they enjoy doing ministry together serving the local church and beyond. When she isn’t taking photos, she can be found crowded around by goats and chickens in the pasture on their family farm Redemption Square sipping a fresh brewed cup of coffee watching her children play outdoors.