First Christmas without Mama will be hard, but I will practice grace and starve grief

My first Christmas without Mama will be hard, but I will practice grace and starve grief to death

I miss my mother. Born in the 1930s, she was raised in Jim Crow Memphis near the Greenlaw Community. Mother graduated “Gold and Blue” Manassas, a Black Memphis High School. Lemoyne-Owen, the local Black college prepared her for a teaching career.

I called her “Mama.” Manassas classmates called her “Earline.” As one of the first Black faculty to integrate Snowden Elementary in midtown Memphis, students called her “Mrs. Duncan.” She taught in the Memphis schools for 39 years.

My mother died this past April during Easter week. Before cancer mangled her brain functions, she had one last request. “Will you mail my Easter cards?”

Her best friend, Georgie, was delighted to oblige.

Every message Earline ‘Mama’ Duncan sent was heartfelt

At the time of her death, Mother was 86 years-old and noted for her monthly dispatch of letters, sealed with U.S. love postage stamps. She kept important dates on her kitchen wall calendar.

So, if she knew your birthday, anniversary, or heard about your ailment, she would write you, a heart-felt message, in her schoolteacher penmanship.

Most of her letters arrived to recipients with a $10 dollar bill. And when you served her any act of kindness, Mother acknowledged you with a prompt and personal, note of gratitude.

During Easter and Christmas, she dispatched warm expressions, widely. With each holiday, she mailed 300 greeting cards to kinfolk, neighbors, Manassas classmates, Sunday school students, and ladies in her Friday prayer circle.

Mother’s Easter cards would include a scripture for your wallet. Her Christmas cards would include a magnetic calendar for your desk or refrigerator.

As for Mother’s five favorite postal clerks, who assisted her ongoing letter ministry, she would serve them Easter and Christmas cupcakes, courtesy of Georgie, an exceptional baker.

My mother’s tradition has carried me through my sorrow

When I consider my personal journey as an educator and writer in the soulful city of Memphis, I understand my good fortune. I had my sweet mother in my life for 55 years. Now, she is an ancestor and I think of her often. Earline. Mrs. Duncan. Mama.

I was her only child. And a lifetime ago, when my father, a Vietnam veteran, left home in my fifth grade year to wrestle with his war demons, I became my mother’s primary focus. I was the daughter she admonished, advised, and adored. Now, here I am, without my North Star.

Back in April, while seated on the front pew in a packed, North Memphis church during my mother’s memorial service, I wondered about the future.

As Georgie spoke her expressions of friendship before the eulogy, specifically, I daydreamed about my first Christmas, without my mother. I saw myself in the future, sulking, detached, and weepy with grief.

Ain’t God good? My first December without my mother is here. I am not snotty-faced or despondent because I found a better response to brooding. In November, as the darkness of the winter holidays approached, I purchased assorted cards, new gel pens, and 100 U.S. Kwanzaa postage stamps.

We can choose to live in sadness, but we are better off to do good

During these weeks leading to Christmas, every day, I have composed holiday greetings, birthday cards, and thank you notes for considerations, received. Also, my mother’s 300 Christmas calendars were shipped to me because I failed to cancel her standing order. So, if we are friends, be advised that I am poised to mail you one.

Here is the lesson. There are moments that I miss my mother and cry. However, life is a sundry of choices and I choose not to sulk.

In the face of segregation, divorce, and cancer, Earline Duncan did not live that way. Earline Duncan gifted me an earnest example in goodness, grace, and gratitude. As I rise-up to practice what I know, hope, peace, joy and love will be my inheritance.

Alice Faye Duncan is the official biographer for U.S. Olympian and TSU Tigerbelle, Willye B. White. She is the author of “Coretta’s Journey,” “This Train is Bound for Glory,” and “Yellow Dog Blues”—a New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Book selection in 2022. Visit her at www.alicefayeduncan.com.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Grief during the holidays: I miss my mama and I am practicing grace