My Mother's Voice

Tears are so close to the surface at all times that I fear that they will run out of my eyes without any control on my part. As I slowly rise from my sleep, I hesitantly check my heart. Conjuring up the image of my mother, head bandaged and eyes closed in an eternal rest, I wait for the expected stab of pain. Quite horrendously, I want to feel that remembered pain. That hurt has become as familiar as my morning coffee. But with that pain, I suffer through another morning of a world without my mother. And once again, for possibly the 1000th time, I ask God how I will live without her, and I ask myself, "when did the pain become my mother"? As time heals the pain, will I also forget her voice? My greatest fear, which was the inevitable death of my infirmed mother, has been replaced with a new greatest fear; will I forget the important things? I would rather have the pain each morning and at unexpected times during my day than to forget her voice.
I am fearful of that, so fearful that once not long ago, I grabbed my cell phone without thinking, hit the number labeled 'mama' which I have not mustered up the courage to finally erase, and listened eagerly. For one brief and unthinking moment, I imagined that she would answer that lonely phone ringing in that deserted house in Rocky Mount. Then in a split-second, when reality set in, I imagined that at least her voice with its gracious message on her answering machine would restore that need to hear her voice. With anger that lived next to the pain and surfaced now like a force that almost knocked down, I heard my own voice and remembered that my mother had asked me to record the voice message for her phone since some had told her that her message was too personal. How could I be so foolish as to walk right into that blazing fire of pain and anger that needed to be extinguished so that I could go on with my life with hearing my own voice on that machine?
What did her original message say? At this moment, as I sit trying to untangle my feelings into straight lines of words and write them into some kind of understanding, there is a burning need to record her words. "I want to talk to you but not right now". So like my mother. She did want to talk to you but couldn't right now and was trying to be as kind as she could in saying it. I repeat these words aloud, trying to say them with the same sincere but southern coated inflection as she had once said them.
In all sincerity, one of my mother's favorite phrases, I cannot escape from the realization that once again I did not savor those moments when I was able to hear her voice. What was I thinking? I knew she was very sick, trying to live alone in constant arthritic pain and equally constantly falling and failing. Did I naively believe that she would always be there, to answer the phone with "Hi Pudding" and sit in that blue chair until I found time in my busyness of life to visit her and seek her company?
I don't learn. I don't stop and hear the sweetness of those voices around me, my family, and my friends. I blindly plow through the day, feigning busy because I am so smugly sure that those student voices, those TV voices, those automated voices, the ones I am attending to are the most important. And I know better. I've lived this anger at my careless and the pain of that since my mother died before.
Today who will I listen to with my undivided attention? Whose voice do I need to memorize? Whose stories do I need to record before the moment is swept away in the whirlwind of my life?

Lord, give me the patience I repeatedly seem to lack to listen without planning my next sentence or seeking an escape route. Lord, give me the wisdom to listen with understanding and love and abandonment of other voices whispering for my attention in my other ear. Lord, give me the ability to listen with discernment, to truly hear the voice and know the pain, the anger, the joy, the fear behind each word. And Lord, give me memory, to recall that voice, as unique and individual as a fingerprint, even after the mouth is forever silenced in death.