We have yet to tell Mama. Only two of five daughters now remain. We do not know how to break the news to her. Ignorance is bliss. She is already delusional, plagued by imaginary bugs. We have no idea what impact this sad news will have on her. But how can one avoid telling her? My eyes are watered. No tears have yet fallen. So many sad thoughts pass through my mind. I have never lost a mother before. Two fathers have been gone for sometime. We now break new earth. I have yet to speak to my siblings. I have no idea when the funeral will be. Pray for us.—Rudy

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'. And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him As they rode him in custody down to the station And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder. But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears, Take the rag away from your face. Now ain't the time for your tears.

Three of her children said that she wanted to lie with her second husband at a military cemetery outside Baltimore. It's uncertain whether her two remaining sisters here at Jerusalem will be able to get to Baltimore for the funeral and the burial. Certainly, Mama at 97 will not be able to make that journey. Life is filled with uncertainties. I did not expect Lucinda to pass before Mama. Both of their lives were filled with hard work and troubles, though they bore them often in the best of spirits. They added much that was worthwhile to our world. Both outlived their husbands. My mother leaves behind four daughters and two sons, grandchildren, and several great grandchildren. For certain, I will miss her dearly.

Distant memories are of you comfortably tattered in that French Provincial chair dressed in the large faded oversized apron you'd sewn tons of pockets on the one you lent your troubles to the one that was gingham checkered and blue the one that became your daily dress seemingly allowing you to hold just about anything within your lap include'n corn need'n to be shucked string beans need'n to be snapped apples need'n to be peeled and cored and those pecan shells from the pecans we both loved and shared in preparation of Sunday desserts . . . the best on the block a lil' sweetness for our insides  from Kin'lin for the Soul: (For Those Who've Loved, and Dare to Love Again

Now mix'n and blending them in well with the proud African American woman that "I AM" of patchwork quilted Underground Railroad descent reminding me to always strive to keep the bitterness away of bringing to myself only the very best a lil' sweetness in this life from Kin'lin for the Soul: (For Those Who've Loved, and Dare to Love Again

Wake (Sunday) May 18th 2pm-8pm Vaughn Green Funeral Home 5151 Baltimore National Pike Baltimore, MD 21229 410 233-2400   Funeral (Monday) May 19th 10 am Calvary Baptist Church 3911 Garrison Boulevard Baltimore, MD 21229

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A Grave Side Funeral

I saw a grave side funeral this afternoon, from the first gathering of family and friends. There was a red tent that had been set up over the grave, under which there were chairs for the closest kin. It was a little overcast. There was a slight breeze. The sun shined through the haze. It was a pretty day for a funeral. Last week, sitting on the front porch, I had seen the father "Spooky" making the arrangement with "Buster," Mama's 80 year old son-in-law, out in the cemetery. I was deep then in my own misery and had not thought what they were about then. So there have been three deaths within a short space. David up the road, his wife died last week, also.

A grave side funeral, I thought observing, has it advantages over the church funeral. Most have to stand in their funeral attire and so the dark formality has to be brief. It was fairly traditional. I overheard a sermon-prayer performed by a woman. I do not know whether she was a preacher or not. But she emotionally and spiritually spoke about how sorrows end and a new life begins beyond the troubles of this world. My cousin and his wife did a duo on the services Jesus does for us all. Then the officiating preacher picked up a handful of red dirt and sifted it onto the silver casket with the earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes trope. He made another passionate plea for the comfort of the family.

The casket was lowered and the gathering began to dissolve, slowly, as those present began to greet and embrace one another. My cousin suited up in black shirt and black tie came over and showed me the obituary notice. The deceased Michael, who had been living some place near Norfolk, had attended the county school and belonged to Jerusalem. Born in 1966, I thought he was much too young. There was a fuzzy color reproduction of him on the notice. I didn't know him but I know his father and probably a number of his kin folk. . . .

I stayed and watched the three funeral-home people pull down the tent, lower the vault top, shovel the remaining red dirt in by the vault, and dress the top with some kind of sealer. Then the three of them took their meal in the cemetery standing up by the truck that brought in the vault. I lost interest and the next I knew they had gone.—Rudy

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Another Look at My Mother’s Sacrificial Life

By Rudolph Lewis

My mother left an estate of probably over $135,000. That's my estimation from what I've seen: a corner rowhouse in Yale Heights, a suburban community in southwest Baltimore on Cedar Garden Road; a house on 2.5 acres of land near Jerusalem Mama deeded her that she inherited from her mother Laura Williams Jackson (born around 1870); car, jewelry, and money; and an insurance policy for her burial.

She was thrifty: she neither smoked nor drank. Somewhat mystical, Lucinda used dream books to interpret her nightly soaring away from the harshness of her world, and to translate her dreams into numbers into cash money. She and her girlfriend Rose were fairly lucky at winning  lottery numbers. She also sold ointments (e.g., Tiger Balm) and other little items out of her house for extra money. She kept a clean house. She was a compulsive cleaner, keeping herself busy until she lay down at night. A wonderful cook.  She had a green thumb, as well: she had plants, and some that flowered, in the front and back yards at Cedar Garden.

Brought to me the day after the funeral by my bother Ronald (next to the last child Lucinda birthed), the obituary notice stated, she started a “new career” and became a “daycare provider” in 1996 after her retirement. Let me translate this obituary that my brother Ronald placed in my hands. First, my mother had no “career.” She was a wage slave and in the worst way, which she bore patiently and in the best of spirits. She worked by the piece in a garment industry folding clothes. Second, she sacrificed and baby sat grandchildren and two great grandchildren until she left for Virginia Beach.

It is quite a site observing a 70-year-old woman who had suffered from high blood pressure for decades running after a frisky one or two year old. The last several years of her life were especially tough, “daycare providing,” while taking care of a husband, Grover Reid, with failing health and afflicted with Alzheimer’s, a man who could be extremely abusive, especially after he had taken medication for erectile dysfunction.

The extent of Lucinda’s estate is quite extraordinary for a woman who started out less than dirt poor, as daughter of a sharecropper living on the Creath farm, just up from Sansi Swamp, within two miles of Jerusalem. I passed that house when I walked with other young scholars two miles to Creath  Elementary School (No.5), a school once attended by Lucinda’s mother (Mama) and her four sisters (Virginia, Susie, Edith, and Ann). Daddy claimed he went to school only one day and was proud of it because he could read write and figure—a builder of houses, a bricklayer, as well as a farmer.

It was a delightful surprise when my first teacher, Margaret Trisvan, who became Mrs. Richards (teaching French and Government at the new Central High School) and then Mrs. Law (wife of the principal of central High), called me to offer her condolences about my mother.

Their Christmases at the Creath farm were very thin. Before she dropped out, Lucinda got to about the ninth grade at Sussex Training School for the Colored. Back then children at the high school level, here in the environs of Jarratt, were not allowed to attend the white high school in Jarratt Town and thus had to travel forty miles by bus to Waverly at the other end of the county. They had chores before and after school, sometimes leaving in the dark and returning in the dark, at a time when most homes in the county were not electrified. She was anxious to leave the country life and the first chance she got to leave she left, though occasionally she out of necessity returned to Jerusalem. Daddy finally built his own ten-room house. So his children would have a place to return if the city became too harsh and dangerous.

A sister of mine also went through the experience of a questionable father. Lucinda bore a daughter by Ashburn "Pip" Stith, one of the many sons of Joe Dick Stith, who was a deacon at Jerusalem until he died in the mid-50s. Joe Dick was the first in the cemetery across the road to have a marble top on his vault. His children poor and pretentious wanted to show he was a man of some standing within the community. The center of Joe Dick's landed empire was called the Low Ground. All or most of that land, I think, has left family hands. The man died in debt. At this stage of my life, nearing sixty years old, I understand the situation of a young poor black woman alone in a great city.

Gender suppression was very real then. A woman needed a man to buy a car or a house and get ahead in life. Lucinda led Grover, who would become her husband much later on, to believe that her third daughter was his. Grover knew she was not his daughter (surely I knew) like he knew Ronald was not his son. Of course, Ronald became a stepson when Grover finally became Lucinda’s husband. But she lied to him and he settled for the lie because he had no better situation. For Lucinda was a traditional woman, cooking for her man, keeping his clothes washed and ironed, and a clean orderly house. She was far above those women on the street he whored.

Well, I don't know whether my estimate of Lucinda’s estate is a legal fact, at this stage. I never asked Lucinda about her business. I was never a burden to her. I never mixed my finances with hers. I never used her as a stepping stone to success, to buy houses or mini-mansions or to add wings to my house. In short, I never exploited her goodness. There may be reasons at this hour her estate has become blurred.

I spent “more quality time” with her since I've returned to Jerusalem. On one of those trips up from Virginia Beach, she brought Bobo a black plastic double bowl for his food and milk.  That was unexpected. I showed her one of my essays that had been published in an anthology on Africa. I don't think she really read it. But she showed an interest. She also showed an interest in my artwork. She had two pieces of them down at Virginia Beach. The last time she was here she got into a fit that my cousin when he moved out of “granny’s house,” the one deeded to her by Mama, that Pete’s woman had not moved all her things out and left the house in order. She called her on her job and threatened to take her to court.

Ronald claims, now months later, that she had given the house to him. Maybe that's truth, I have not been shown any evidence of that. I am uncertain I can take his word for truth. I have yet to be given an accounting and I have yet to hear a will read.

The last time I saw her I promised to take care of the junk left in granny's house. She left the keys with me before she returned to Virginia Beach. But my teaching duties at Sussex Central intervened and I have yet gotten in the mood to do what was Pete’s responsibility.  But since my brother Ronald says he owns the house I feel no more of a duty to deal with what he now says is his. To keep her company I rode  with my sister Theresa, who lives in Petersburg, when she took Lucinda back to Virginia Beach.

For the first time, I got to see my brother’s mini-mansion and her room in her son’s  house. My impression is that she restricted herself to her room, in a wing my brother had just added to accommodate her, a wing which also included his invalid mother in law, restricted to a hospital bed. From what I heard the wing cost as much as the house. Ronald’s wife and daughter are also there. I thought it was odd that my mother would move from a situation of independence in Baltimore to one of dependency in Virginia Beach under her daughter-in-law.

That's dedication and sacrifice to the next generation to three or four children living under roof, for which you are primarily responsible. She was unlucky with men. They have a name for them today in our new feminist context, “deadbeat dads.” She married first to William Lee Carter. Lucinda and William Lee stayed together probably  a year at Herbert and Elsie Carter’s house before she was back with her folks. Celestine was born over there in the Carter’s house in Greensville and Deborah was born in Richmond while she was living with Uncle Richard. Elsie Carter was a Jordon (pronounced "Jerden"), the daughter of the fabled Jim Jordon, the root doctor. I wrote a story based on one of Mama's stories in which the man treated Daddy when he had been poisoned, titled Conjuring & Doctoring.

Those two sisters are now exceedingly proud of the Carters, one of those yellow-looking families, except for the darker Clarence and Margaret, the two I loved the most. After killing one and wound another, Clarence was killed by cops in a shoot-out near Dew Drop Inn in Emporia in 1956, suspected of running moonshine. But William Lee abandoned his wife and his daughters and a stepson. Left with three children, Lucinda back on her own without a supporting husband, (by that time I was four or five) had only Mama and Daddy and their family to support her. And then another daughter came, Theresa, by Ashman "Pip" Stith. She saw her father before he passed. She led Grover to believe Theresa was his daughter. But I had seen her birth certificate in a drawer. Mama also had her named changed to Lewis.

The men Lucinda hooked up with always underperformed and there is probably some economic justification for their failures to meet their obligations as men and fathers. Such was the case with my purported father, Edler Wyche, who worked at Bethlehem Steel before he was forced to retire because of a skin disease. I was quite embarrassed when Lucinda took me over to his house at 1011 Darley Avenue. That was his oldest sister Ruth’s house, actually. She had several brothers living there, including Nat and James Lawrence. I forget her married name. For her husband Wesley was there as well. Lucinda took me over there when Sears and Roebuck was at the corner of North and Harford for Whitey to buy me clothes to begin high school. The fathers of her children were all scoundrels in one way or another.  Lucinda had at least three children outside of marriage. She divorced one husband and buried the other. With his new wife, William Lee, the father of Celestine and Deborah, attended Lucinda's funeral, I understand.

I "gave her away" in marriage to her last husband, Grover Reid. I had lived in their household as a teenager on Colborne Road in Edmondson Village, off of Wildwood Parkway when I first went to Baltimore in 1965 after graduating from high school at sixteen to attend Morgan State College. With her three daughters, she had just moved out of an apartment in Cherry Hill, the projects built for blacks just south of a decaying downtown. My mother was an ambitious woman who strived to improve life for herself and children. But back in those days a woman needed a man in order to buy anything, especially a car or a house. She and Grover remained there at Colborne at least until three of her daughters graduated from Edmondson High. Vigorous and fertile, she bore another son, Ronald, and her last daughter in her mid or late forties, clearly Grover’s daughter. We still have yet to discover who was Ronald's natural father. There is no mark of Grover on him.

She needed Grover in order to buy a house in Edmondson Village. Though black and handsome, he was a trifling man folks called "Cigar." Lucinda provided a stability for his life he would not otherwise had. He had another family and he could not take care of  and did not take care those children. He used to hang out at The Avenue pool halls and at one time was down at Jessup Cut, the Maryland penitentiary. He was at the Cut for knifing Eggy Epps. But he had also been arrested for shooting craps on the streets. Grover was a knife man and once threaten to draw on me while I was living at Colborne.

Summers, I worked with Grover at odd jobs like pouring cement for pools, raking the mud into place, and other such odd construction jobs. He was Lucinda's boyfriend and not my father, though he helped to pay her bills. But he had a lot of mouth and a lot of sway over her. He was a Georgia boy, a player with two families. Goldberg or Goldstein was selling houses to blacks with small print stipulations, like if a missed payment occurred the buyer reverts to a renter and she later discovered she was not buying but actually renting. Parren Mitchell and other rising black politicians led a big demonstration which included me down St. Paul Avenue to protest this real estate heist.

After an exchange of words about a raised window, one evening, on my return from Morgan, Lucinda had packed my bags and left them at the foot of the steps. I was about eighteen. That was part of Grover’s influence over her. I was a country boy and proud of it and I knew how to work and so I was ready to go back to Jerusalem. My aunt Ann who was living in the same house with her kids, in the basement, talked to Mama and so I ended up living with my aunt about a year in the basement and then latter on Allendale off of Edmondson Avenue.

And then I hit the streets, joined Baltimore SNCC, and Walter Hall Lively’s U-JOIN. With Bob Moore sometimes I was staying in abandoned buildings, with rats and a .45. There were times I slept at the Trailways Bus Station on Fayette. Other times I was sleeping at the SNCC Office (later Liberation Press) at 432 E. North Avenue. Then for a time I stayed at Whitey’s house. I left Darley Avenue because Whitey was so weak-minded he thought his woman wanted me more than him.  After she put me out in 1967, one exceptional case in 1980-81 I slept in my mother's house. That was when I was working on my master’s at University of Maryland. My landlord, Fred Mason, Jr. (also weak-minded for women), his third wife Yvonne put me out in the street after midnight after I arrived by bus from College Park. Yvonne, one of those long-legged high yellow gals from northern Virginia (exceedingly proud of her slavemaster origins and a sex freak to boot) had thrown all my school papers including my thesis out in the backyard. Only recently, several times while I was in transit by train to New York, did I stay at her house and then it was in the basement.

My life has always been modest. Unlike three of my sisters and my mother I chose not to work the same job thirty years. I have had numerous jobs from driving a cab to taking care of retarded men (washing shit off them) to teaching writing and composition at the University of New Orleans. I've studied at three universities (including on two types of doctoral degree, neither finished) and received three degrees (including two master's) from the University of Maryland, College Park. My education has never produced me wealth though I think it has made me a better man than my brother. I had faith that God would stand by my choices, hold me up as I fall,  and make a way for me.

My mother was much more materialistic and practical than I, though the quality of my life I believe was far greater than hers or those of my sisters and brother. Their material wealth far exceeds my own, even my married youngest sister, Aisha, Grover and Lucinda’s only daughter (my youngest sister), to whom my mother was planning to sell her house and leasing it when she died.

From my mother's eyes my younger brother was far more financially secure than I (and trustworthy), especially after he returned from Japan after a decade or more, then married the mother of his daughter (then almost a teenager), a wedding I attended but did not participate. Lucinda, my mother, I learned through sources, gave my younger brother Ronald power of attorney. That is she trusted him to handle her business as she would. Did he do that? Well, at this point, it has yet to be determined. I asked him for an accounting of her estate. He wanted to know why I wanted to know that. It is regrettable he's turned out to be a scoundrel, for he's much too soft for that game.

So standing with him there in the dark by his car in the backyard, I asked him, as he was about to get in his car to return to his mini-mansion in Virginia Beach, with the new wing, was he the executor of her estate. He said, yes, that Lucinda had left a will and that I was in it. I told him I would like to see it and he asked why. So he tells me she had no money left, and that it was his intent to give the Cedar Garden house to our youngest sister. So I left it at that, hugged him, shook hands, and went and took a pee.

My friend Miriam told me that it was her experience that distance grows in a family when a parent or parents die. I suppose that is especially true when there is an estate involved. Or when a sibling thinks he or she is more deserving of the love or wealth left behind. Or maybe he or she thinks the parent received more from her or his pocket than others and so that at the death of the parent, it's time to cash in and receive recompense. I do not know that this distancing will be the case with my younger brother.

But there have been movies made about such situations, which questioned what son is more worthy: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. There is a “Big Daddy” character played by Burl Ives; his younger son Brick played by Paul Newman and Brick’s wife played by Elizabeth Taylor. Before her death,  my mother told me she owned her house and she made out that granny’s house was still hers when she came here the last time, complaining about junk left in it by the former tenant, and threatening to take the woman to court.. How does one give away what one does not own? My brother Ronald told me I would be receiving a letter from a probate officer. It was then I shook his hand and took my pee.

I was cool. I did not want a confrontation with “Sir Ronald,” the moniker he used to use when he was in Japan.  I stayed up all night, walking the floor, taking strolls out under the stars, talking to God. My mother was dead. I felt somewhat miserable I did not go to the funeral that my brother and two sisters arranged for our mother. Well, if they wanted her body, and wanted her body to stay up there away from her family, it was just a corpse! I possessed the real spirit of my mother in my heart. So I decided to let them make their show and I would do what I thought necessary in telling the truth about my mother’s life. Through my writings and my friends,  I would provide her a more honorable rendering of her struggles and sacrifices.

I called and asked my brother Ronald to bring her here to Jerusalem. He said he and two of our sisters could testify that she wanted to be buried up there in Baltimore County in a military cemetery by her second husband, Grover Reid, whom he thinks is his natural father. Or does he? Is he such a fool unable to recognize the striking dissimilarity. Did he ever look in the mirror with his fat face and ask, am I really this dark-skinned man's son? How can one fat boy be so blind? He prefers to live the lie, to deny the fact that he is only a stepson, like me. I had suggested it before when I published Mama’s Letters, in notes, in small print. He and a couple of my sisters got into a huff about it. Now he wants vindication by burying her in a military cemetery by Grover, as if he headed a bourgeois household.

She had not mentioned burial in Maryland to any of us here. Grover had been exceedingly hard on her in his last years and she even threatened to call the police on him for he had threatened to rape her. I told him on the phone it would be a bit awkward to have a funeral in which Lucinda’s two sisters and mother would not be present. So my brother the cold fish had his way. I stayed with Mama and Ann was driven to the Sunday Wake by two of her sons. Susie had a bout of congestive heart failure. She sent her three sons The Monday funeral was ten in the morning, the next day. And one of Ann's sons, Michael, had to be at work by seven that morning. They buried her a week after her death so that they could meet the cemetery scheduling to put her beside Grover.

The following Tuesday, Ronald stopped by and brought six-page obituary notices that included images of the family including artwork of Mama and Daddy painted by Kaki, a Baltimore artist. Those paintings were done about seven years ago. They remain in a plastic bag. I made cards of them and passed them out on Mama’s 90^th birthday, organized my Ann and held at the Senior Citizen’s Center in Jarratt Town.. After he left, I finally read the obituary notice that they had put together. It was far beneath what I would have said, written and published. They did not consult me on the draft, filled with religious and sentimental claptrap, the standard for such notices.

In short, I did not care for the way my mother had been represented. My presence at the funeral would have attested to half truths and misrepresentations. But I had begun this online page far before the Wake and the Funeral. This page was my way of dealing personally with my mother's death and a way of representing the reality of her life as I knew it. For me, this process began more than a decade ago when I began to pull together Mama's stories and Mama's letters, our family histories.

No, it began when I was a little boy when I used to cry and ask, Mama aren’t you my mama? And she’d say, sure I am. This occurred in response to Mama’s oldest daughter, Virginia, who emphasized the truth that she was my aunt and not my sister. She would not go along with the lie that was concocted for whatever reason. I have yet gotten a clear answer of the rationale for the fantasy of my origins. I raised it with Lucinda and I raised it with Mama and they had different responses. Neither satisfactory, I will go to my grave not knowing the truth. It was not as if I was left on the door step. Yet, Lucinda placed me in good hands, her mother and father. When I came of age I was glad that she gave me to them. I would have indeed been a troubled man if I had to stand silent on the sidelines and allow trifling men, scoundrels abuse her. I might have grown to hate my mother, rather than feel the distance.

All these writings and accounts of family history  some may account as the "airing of dirty linen" or "opening a closet of skeletons." I see them as healing acts. Sir Ronald, as he tried to raise himself above his impoverished origins, my fellow bastard brother has belittled my mother. She was not a bourgeois matron with a husband to provide her needs. She slaved and found whatever means necessary to provide her children, including dating and sleeping with men she thought would be the One. The five men who fathered her children were not worthy of her, neither husband, William Lee nor Grover. It was through her own thrift, ingenuity, and imagination that she left a substantial estate.

For some reason Sir Ronald Lucinda’s sacrifice was just for him and Aisha, that her estate, her life’s work was theirs to inherit, that her life was left to him how she would be remembered. He is one of those who would place a plastic front on a billion dollar house and think he has done well. He’s a common man without true taste and discretion. He's a low middle-class pretender. I will not stand on the sideline and be silent. He has now gone to the judges and lawyers to determine, Lucinda, your last will and testament. The courts may agree with his version of your life. But I possess a pen to render true the actuality and spirit of your life.  

Lucinda, you were too trusting of Sir Ronald. It is difficult to recognize the hatred and bitterness in the hearts of men. It becomes too easy at times to overlook the secret lives of sons, hoping that they will become the men you never had. You ended your life by giving up your long-lived independence by paying $100, 000 for a room in Sir Ronald’s mini-mansion (his wife’s house), a room you lived in for only seven months. This realization, coming so late, broke your heart and you willingly gave up the ghost that had become your life. You know I could never participate in such a farce: a peasant woman, a working class slave woman, transformed finally into a pale mocking image of yourself.

Oh, Lucinda, how tragic, you bent the truth of your children’s faithless fathers to get ahead in life in order to care for your five children and provide a means for them to step up into a middle-class life. In the end, Sweet Lucinda, you were duped by a son you loved too much. As your first son, I won’t demean, I won’t falsify your life. You were magnificent as you were. My pen will cause you to rise up with all your faults and foibles, and be glorified in your stubborn motherly sacrifices, for eternity, in all your youthful beauty.

Goodbye, dear heart, I am loving you madly.

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More Condolences

Brother . . . pleased to hear you've moved past constant grieving toward moving on—will read your piece and get back asap . . . have been writing (rarely stay up all night—sleep at drop of hat) for the last two days. Finished a more 1/2 scholarly/1/2 poetry for an Iowa Journal that asked me to revise a submission titled "Food for Thought: Empathy and the Imagination-Intellect" and wrote the first act of a play about AIDS titled She Said He Said, on the computer beginning the second act now. Blessings Rudy, Peace—Mary

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Hi Rudy,

You can say that I've been so out of the loop.  I did not know that your dear mother passed away. Wow!  One can never know that feeling until it's for real. There is no rehearsal and nothing that compares.  I know that you will make her memory live on forever in your writing; there's no doubt about that.  For when it comes down to it, our people and our experiences are really all that we have.  Keep on writing!

I've been up all night myself too.  Just took a bath and will probably begin getting the kids up in an hour. We go to church down in Boykins (Shiloh), so we need to leave here around 10 am to be on time.  It's youth Sunday, and my littlest boy sings in the choir. The other is a drummer, and really on edge with the fact the church doesn't need him (smile).  So he helps his grandpa with the videoing.

Anyway, here's a picture of my three sons (smile).  This last one, Kaleb Ezra, was born on March 17th, and he's the reason I've been so out of the loop. I never know when he's going to sleep through the night.  He's  mostly been sleeping through days.—Faison

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Nice page of tributes to your Mom.—Kam

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Dear Rudy:
 
I don't know where I was or what I was doing, but I did not know that your mother had passed. Please accept my heartfelt condolences. I am sad for your loss but happy for your recovery and hopefulness to "stay on with us". Your friend, —Joyce

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Dear Rudy,

I am so sorry about the death of your mother on Mother's Day. I did not know that until now. May you find strength in her homegoing. I always believe that "after the sap is gone, then comes strength." God bless. —Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

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I am sorry to hear about your mother loss. My prayers are with you—Sheila

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My dear Rudy . . .

I have just caught up with emails and your essays.  I was in Cancun for several days at the wedding of a friend's son. At the same time, my computer has been acting up . . . and I have missed several emails.

I am just learning of the death of your mother Lucinda.  I feel your grief , but am so grateful that you have expressed it all so eloquently and honestly in your writings. It can and has been a healing process for you.

Today, June 1st was the 22nd anniversary of the death of my mother. My daughter wanted to pat my shoulder and my hand, as if to console me. She is not trapped by the grave . . . but is in my heart and mind and mouth everyday of my life. I have no tears . . . because she is with me every day. I smile about her life . . . and "live" her teachings and "live" and breathe her thoughts and lessons . . . and share them with my own adult daughters.

Your writings of your mother and your family pose and present your own truths to the ears and eyes of others who might be afraid of their own truths.

Bravo for TRUTH, HISTORY and LOVE!  Much love and care, Beverly

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Rudy, sorry to hear about your birth mother's death. At least she died celebrating, surrounded by loved ones, and you were clearly there in spirit.—David

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We should all be so honored as to have a life's story so worth telling and for it to be told by one so honorable—Namaskar

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Beloved . . . I have been so busy lately that I haven't had much of an opportunity to read emails.  My inboxes are stuffed to capacity therefore bouncing. But tonight when I read this email (out of the thousands cluttering my box, I always choose yours first) my heart went out to you.  I am so sorry about your loss.  I know that she'd been sick for awhile & you nearly lost her last year.  She was a strong lady that hung in there for the long haul... giving you time to make the adjustment.  An adjustment that is never easy no matter how many warnings that the day is near. I can't think of anything truly comforting to say that you haven't heard already so I'll just say that I love you & pray that time will ease your pain sooner than later. From my heart to yours, CC

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