I knew my mom had died when most of my family came to church. It wasn’t something that always happened, them coming to church and I could see it in their faces that she was gone. I was crying as they were singing. Everybody knew except me. Well I knew, but I wasn’t sure of it. Later on that day my younger sister and I went to my grandmother’s house from my mother’s side. Everybody was there including my aunt and uncle who were in the army, and my grandpa who hardly comes around. My grandmother asked for everyone to stand in a circle and hold hands.“You know Nikki has been holding on for a long time now. Well, she finally decided to let go. She died this morning,” she said.
I don’t remember how others reacted when they heard the news. I only remember hearing a lot of weeping. When I found out that my mom had died, I was thinking to myself that this is the end of my life. I was also thinking that there was no way that I was going to be able to handle this. In my head, I wanted to kill myself because I felt like, now that she was gone, there was no one else to listen to me. Everything around me was moving fast, and I couldn’t control what was going on. I couldn’t help but cry. I felt like this was my breaking point and I was never ever going to be able to get past it.
I can see her in my mind right now. My mom was short and thick. She was not fat at all. My mom had really small feet, and dreads, but before she had dreads she kept her hair braided. Her favorite color was sky blue, and her favorite singer was Anita Baker. My mom always crocheted while eating a bag of Frito Lay sun flower seeds. She was very good at braiding hair and was a huge wrestling fan. She loved Triple H. My mom only wore silver jewelry because she was allergic to gold just like me.
When I was fourteen my mom started to get really sick. I found out that she had Leukemia when I was eleven. She had Cancer for six years and it had just started getting worse. We were really close. My mom and I used to go everywhere together. We used to go food shopping, to the nail salon, to the park, to the library. My mother was a bookworm, and in the house she had her very own personal library. She was also a writer; she wrote poems, songs, and she wrote almost everyday in a diary. She was very out going and went to parties all the time. My mom is the one that taught me how to dance. Then she had Leukemia. She had to go through Chemotherapy and all of that. I was out of school for that week, not only because of her death but it was also Thanksgiving break. That week my grandmother and my sisters and I went to Coney Island to spread her ashes.
It was at 172nd Morrison Avenue, in Bronx Bible Church. There were a bunch of children outside running around dancing. It smelled like bagels, jelly, and butter. After church, Ms. Florence pulled me to the side to talk to me. Ms. Florence is tall, brown skinned and has long hair. She walks with a limp now because she was in a car accident. She lives across the street from the church and comes to church every single Sunday and sits in the third row, and sometimes she even stays for the second service. She took me to the side and said to me, “If I were to tell you that I was going to give you a ring, but when I asked for it back, you had to give it back to me, and you agreed, and then I let you hold the ring for a long period of time and I finally decided to ask for it back, would you give it back to me?”
“Yes, I would give it back to you,” I said. Then she said, “That’s what God did with your mom. She was a ring that you held for a long period of time, but now he asked for it back.” I hugged her and cried.
When Ms. Florence was explaining to me that my mom was like a ring from God, at first I couldn’t understand what she meant until she clarified it. I felt special because she took the time out to talk to me and pass down a story that someone else told her when her favorite aunt had died. I never thought that she could make such an impact on me the way she did. I thought that I was just a regular person to her that said “hi” and “bye.” But she showed me that there was so much more to our relationship than “hi” and “bye.” I felt like there was somebody in the world that actually cared about my feelings.
My conflict was that I could not get over my mother. It hurt me bad and I just couldn’t stop thinking about it and at one point, I blamed myself because I ran away during the time she was in the hospital. My grandmother had told me that maybe if I didn’t run away, my mom wouldn’t have been in that situation. So I blamed myself. When Ms. Florence told me the story, it made me at ease. It made me able to deal with her death in a different way.
This story is important to me because this was an experience in my life that had a huge effect on me. My mother’s death was something that could not be turned over. This is something that I will always remember. It’s not like this is something that happens and you get over it within days, this is something I have to live with for the rest of my life.
Looking back at this story, it makes me think that this is something I can pass down to other people. When other deaths occur, I think about the story and how I can impact others’ lives. If Ms. Florence didn’t tell me that story, I would probably be suicidal after every death. Even though I have this, it is not going to be easy for me to deal with deaths, its just going to remind me that that person who died was a ring from God.
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