Author's Note: The main character of this story has cancer. If that will bother you, please stop here.
We find ourselves at a roadside memorial to a victim of a fatal car accident.
55 years ago, Martha’s only child Timmy was killed at 18 years old when the car he was a passenger in crashed into a telephone pole on Oak Street.
The spot was less than a quarter mile from her home in which she still lives.
The heartbreak she still feels is reserved for, and can only be understood by, mothers who have lost an only son. So many people have told her that they knew how she felt. She always silently smiled, but she wanted to scream
“You have no idea how I feel! My boy is gone!”
But she never did as she was a polite Christian woman.
For 55 years she visited the memorial she had created for him almost daily. She always brought fresh flowers and laid them at the base of the three foot tall wooden cross she had installed herself the day she buried him at the cemetery. When asked why she didn't go to the cemetery, where he was laid to rest, she always responded with:
"That is only his physical body. I like to be exactly where he left our mortal realm and entered heaven. I feel the closest to him there, as if I could reach into heaven and hug him."
His football Jersey (well, the twentieth replica of his original) was stapled to the pole.
She would hug the telephone pole, press her face against his jersey, as if his living body was still inside it, and close her eyes and talk to her Timmy.
“My sweet, sweet boy. Momma’s here now. Momma loves you so much. Sorry I couldn’t come yesterday. Momma’s getting old and her body doesn’t always want to do what Momma’s mind tells it to do!
Do you like the flowers I brought you? I am always here for you and I hope you have never felt alone since God took you from me. I know you are safely cradled in God and Jesus’s arms. Someday your momma will be holding you forever.”
One night, Martha woke up and was having a hard time breathing. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital and an inoperable lung cancer was discovered.
Her husband made sure she was comfortable when they moved her into hospice. Martha had given him very specific instructions for when she was close to death. That moment didn't take long to come.
One morning, the doctors told him that by the end of the day, the morphine drip would take away her remaining pain and also her life.
So, her husband put Martha’s plan in motion. He removed her from hospice and brought her to the memorial.
She sat in a wheelchair, hugging Timmy’s football jersey (well, the twentieth replica of his original). The portable morphine drip and oxygen worked perfectly.
She was beaming and tears of joy were running down her cheeks.
She was so glad she would die and cross over into heaven exactly where her beloved Timmy had. She knew he would be waiting.
Martha: “My sweet, sweet boy, Momma is coming to you finally, my beautiful baby. You will never be alone again.”
She continued to speak to Timmy and within a few minutes she was incoherently mumbling as the morphine took a greater hold.
They removed her oxygen.
Eventually she was silent.
Four hours later Martha expired, the most beautiful joyous smile still on her lips, her right cheek pressed against his jersey, and her arms hugging that pole with all of her might.
She was buried next to Timmy two days later.
Sad story. Not just the mother’s sadness. But that she thought the telephone pole was where her son’s soul was.