Stories of Other Loss
The Day I Lost My Mama
by Everlena Hemingway, Chicago, U.S.A.
The day I lost my mother I was fifteen. It was an unseasonably warm day in February of 1971. My family lived in a shanty shack in a little town named Swifttown, in the state of Mississippi. My morning started out with Sunday school at the local church. One of my older sisters had just recently return home from Chicago Illinois for a vacation. There was light rain that morning, and the sky was over-casted and grey. After the church service we visited some friends who lived near the church and then walked home. We made it home before the rain came. On the inside of the house the rain started and soon came down in earnest. The wind picked up, to the point that I became anxious. I had often felt this way during rain storms. Little did I know that this day would be like no other I had experienced before. We were safely inside the house, but I did not feel safe. One of my sisters put on some church music for us to listen to. My mother sat before the gas heater in the front room and read her bible. The events of the day swiftly started to change with the entry into the house of two other brothers and a younger brother. The wind came in behind them. My oldest brother brought news that a tornado was heading directly toward us, and we were told to get down on the floor. When the wind busted through the front door, my brother attempted to close the door, but could not do so because the wind was too strong. We were all instructed to get to the back of the house. In the process of moving toward the one door we would all have to go through my mother was beside me, I touched her, before I found myself being lifted into the air by the wind. The house was suddly gone from around me and she was gone. I hung upside down in the wind, and looked back to the earth. I saw my room below,and the iron bed on the ground. I stretched my hands toward the bed, it did not make sense why the bed was there on the ground and I was in the air. My goal was to grasp the bed. I struggle to reach it. The wind let me go and I fell to the ground. Memory fails me for a period of time, I recall bricks from the chimney falling above me in a light that was white and grey enough for me to make out the shapes of things in the air. There are cut marks in my head from where something struck me, perhaps that accounts for the silence which I experienced, perhaps it was the silence of being knocked out. When the terrible wind past over, and the rain turn to a drizzle, all that was heard was the cries of those injured. I knew I was alive, then it became apparent that other family members were also alive, and up and walking about. But mama was no where to be found, and my sister had a terrible tale to tell us, of our two young brothers flying in the air, and she could not reach out and catch but one, the youngest one. The other one lay on the ground with us, wounded and near death. Though his death came some days later, he never regained the ability to communicate with us, help did not come soon enough to get him to a hospital which could provide the open heart surgery needed to remove the gate post which had impaled him through his heart. A week later, in a foster home, I learned that mama's body was found in a field, of course she was dead. I will always feel that I was the last one to touch her. For years I felt guilty that I survived and she died. She was right there with me, and I somehow felt that I should have been able to protect her, and not she protect me, after all, she had been sick for at least two years, and was recovering. What if was a part of my thoughts for over ten years or more, and now in the year 2007, I feel healed, and reconciled with mama's death and the death of my younger brother, knowing that a fifteen year old girl could do nothing at the time to protect them or save them. My bout with post traumatic stress disorder after the tornado, lasted for to long, until I got the professinal counseling and healing which I needed.
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