My Mother Was The Only Witness

Her mother told it the same way every time, and the way she told it was better than what happened, and everybody in that family knew it and nobody ever said so.

It went like this.

There was a storm coming in over the ridge, and everybody could see it, and the man doing it looked up at the sky and looked at the seven or eight people standing there and said, "Well, we are going to get wet either way." And her mother would deliver that line with the timing of a woman who had been telling it for forty years and knew exactly how long to leave before the next bit.

Then there was something about the water being so cold it made a grown man say a word he had to apologize for.

Then there was the part about her own grandmother, who was eighty-something and had walked down from the road on two sticks and refused all help, standing at the front with her chin up like she was daring the weather.

And then the end of it, which was always the same sentence: "And then it come down on us, and not one of us moved."

She has heard that maybe two hundred times. At tables, at funerals, once in a hospital corridor at four in the morning to a nurse who had not asked. It is a family object, the way a clock is a family object.

Her mother died in March.

And what she has discovered since, and what she was not remotely prepared for, is that the story was the record. There is nobody else. Her grandmother has been gone thirty years. The man who did it moved away and died. The seven or eight people are five graves and two unknowns. There is no photograph and no card and no note in any Bible.

She was two weeks old.

She is sixty-six now, and it took her until about August to work out what was actually bothering her, and when she did, she was ashamed of it, which is why it has taken until now to say it anywhere at all: with her mother went the only person who could say, out loud, that she belonged to God.

What the telling was and what it was not

I want to begin with the shame, because you named it yourself and I am not going to leave it lying there.

You said you were ashamed of what was bothering you. Ashamed because a woman of sixty-six who has walked with God the whole way ought not to need her mother to say a thing out loud in order for it to be so.

Take that off. Right now, at the start, before anything else.

Grief does not observe the rules of theology and it never has. You buried your mother in March, and one of the things you buried was a voice that had been telling you who you were since before you could hold your own head up, and the fact that God does not depend on that voice does not make it a small thing to lose. You are not being childish. You are recently bereaved, and God is not standing over that with His arms folded, and Scripture says He is near to the broken hearted, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter and He is not doing that job at arm's length.

Now let me put the fact underneath you.

By thee have I been holden up from the womb: thou art he that took me out of my mother's bowels: my praise shall be continually of thee.Psalm 71:6

That is an old man's psalm. The whole of Psalm 71 is somebody at the far end of life, and this is the verse where he reaches all the way back past everything anybody could have told him about himself.

By thee have I been holden up from the womb. The holding started before the telling. Before there was anybody in the room to witness anything, before there was a story to tell at tables and funerals and to a nurse in a corridor at four in the morning, God was already holding.

You have been held up by God since before your mother had a story to tell about you, and that is not a kindness I am offering a woman in her first year of grief, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is going somewhere below the ribs rather than into your considerable knowledge of the Bible.

Now let me say something about the story itself, because I do not want a single word of this to sound like I am taking it off you.

Keep it. Tell it. Tell it at your own table with the same timing, and leave the same gap before the next bit, because the gap was the best part and it belongs to your family now. You are the keeper of that telling and it is a real inheritance. Scripture puts the holding up at the womb, before any account of it existed, and the Holy Spirit has been the continuous witness ever since.

But it was never the deed. It was the account, and an account is a wonderful thing and it is not the thing itself. Your mother was not the guarantor of your belonging to God. She was its most enthusiastic reporter for sixty-six years, which is a different and lovelier job.

You are His today and the storm over the ridge was already His weather, and Scripture puts the holding in God's own hands from the womb onward, and the Spirit inside you has been the continuous witness in a way that no human being was ever asked to be.

And here is the last of it, and I want to be gentle with it because I know what season you are in.

There is no living voice that can say it out loud to you now. That is true and it is a real loss and I am not going to dress it up. But you have a voice, and it is a good one, and it has been used in that family for sixty-six years, and it is entirely capable of saying out loud the thing that has never needed a witness in the first place. The word says your praise is continually of Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that voice in you for sixty-six years.