Grief is unlike any other part of the human experience. I do not have a lot of experience with it. I’ve lost people I loved before, but Mamaw was the first person I had known and loved since I was born to pass away. I thought I was prepared for it. She was 92; her health had been failing for a while. One of her biggest challenges was taking the correct plethora of medication at the correct time. She would mess this up and her blood pressure would jump to 210/100. This happened more than once, but sometimes her bp would jump this high with her medication correct. She had gone over the hill physically and was marching through the valley.
She still had her wit though. She was an avid reader. I can still picture her, with her feet covered by a throw, laying on my parents’ couch, lost in her latest novel. She passed this love to my mom, who, in turn, passed it down to me. I gorged myself on book after book while I was locked up. I’m glad she taught my mom to love books. How many 9th grade drop outs do you know that consumed books into their 90’s, or at any age for that matter? I knew 1. She was not a normal woman. If not for her, I would have never been able to write, writing comes from reading.
The moment my mom told me Mamaw was gone, my mind was transported back, not to the last time I saw her, but to a much more important time to me.
I was locked up from May 16th until November 13th(my birthday) before I got my first visitation with my family. I was a trustee at Rankin Country before I was able to be around any of them, without glass or chains being involved.
My parents, my sister, and Queen Bee had seen me on a court date in Madison County. I looked rough. I had been living on just jail food for over a month. I was being moved around a lot, because I had charges and court dates in multiple counties. This kept me from being able to buy commissary. Madison County jail only feeds men about 1800 calories each day. I looked like i had stage 4 cancer or AIDs. Even the chains, that were fastened to me, that day, had a hard time staying up on me. Your boy was sagging.
I could see the worry in my family’s face. Mamaw was not there that day. She knew my general situation dating back to when I had to first go to rehab. She knew I was having problems with drugs. She did not know when my mom started finding blood on my dress shirts from shooting up. She didn’t know every time I got arrested or almost died from overdose or murder. My mom did her best to protect Mamaw from specifics like this.
Once we realized I probably wasn’t getting out anytime soon, my mom told Mamaw about me being in jail. She tried to share with Mamaw the most general info about my status. She wanted to give Mamaw hope, but we didn’t have a lot of concrete, hopeful things to tell her. Mamaw had known all the different jails I had been in, but she did not know what my prospective sentence was. This means that for about 5 months, all she knew for sure was that I was in jail with criminals, bad people. In every news article, every live report, about people who were incarcerated, she would see her youngest grandson, in a possible situation like the one she was seeing.
This would cause many older women to worry incessantly. She did lose some sleep over it, but every time a worry or anxious thought would creep in, Mamaw would pray simple, life-saving and changing prayers for me.
After 6 months of not touching a single person, who shared my blood, I was pumped once I was sentenced to be a trustee. This meant I would get a live and in-person visit with My dad, mom, sister, Queen Bee, and Mamaw, on my birthday. It was the best day I had had in years. Everyone hugged me so tight, for so long.
No one hugged me as tight or as long as Mamaw did. After hugging me for the shortest eternity ever, Mamaw looked at me and reached up and just began touching my face, as tears streamed down her face. She was expecting me to look rough, but I had been eating good food for about 1.5 months and was looking pretty fit. While continuing to touch my face, she looked at my mom and said, “Jinnie, our boy, just looks so good, doesn’t he? I sure did miss you. You look so good, boy!”
She kept repeating this throughout the entire visit and continued tell my mom how good I look for over a month after the visit.
Mamaw called me boy as a term of endearment. I don’t save all my flirting for Bird. I spend some of it on the other most important women in my life, my Mamaw, my mom, my sister, and soooooo many nieces. I pick and play and laugh and love them very deeply. I can still see Mamaw, firing right back at me, after one of my picking sessions, the biggest smile on her face. I can still hear her voice, “Boy, you better get back! Come here and let me teach you!”
After hugging, we sat down and spent 1.5 hours reminding me why these people were worth the hard days ahead. I had about 500 days of lock-up left. Seeing my people, on that day, reminded me to make them count. The whole time we sat, talked, and laughed, Mamaw held my hand. There was not a single second of the visit, that I did not touch my families matriarch.
My family had brought me a copy of Grisham’s latest novel for my birthday. It was a hardback; we were not allowed to have hardbacks. I was still in a 50 man dorm, not up in the higher end module yet. Jail rules still applied. After watching my Mamaw love on me the way she did, the guard’s heart was softened towards me, and he allowed me to sneak the new book in. It’s important to remember, when you show love to someone, that people watch, because the guard saw how much my Mamaw loved me, then it made it easier for him to see me as a human, not just a criminal. Humans are lovable. When my mind jumped to this scene, I could instantaneously feel Mamaw’s hands on my face again. She was gone, but her love remained.
After hanging up, I was not crying, yet. I felt a feeling I had never felt before. I figured, if I could just get up and get to work, then I could control my emotions. I have always been great at compartmentalizing things.
I decided to run to the bathroom, to check myself out. As soon as the door closed, I melted. I did not know what I was feeling, but every bit, of whatever it was, was finding its way out of my tear ducts and onto my crinkled cheeks. I couldn’t catch my breath. I wasn’t thinking in complete sentences. My brain was saying things like, “Just….cry…dont…man….bardin…Mamaw…no”
Thoughts were in my head, but as they made their way out into the world, I couldn’t understand them through my tears and sobs. I took one big breath and begged the tears to stop. It took every piece of my determination and strength I had to will the tears back into a more secret place. In between sobs, I took a deep breath and went back to my computer. Within 30 seconds of sitting down. The tears I thought I could contain were pushing my eye balls out. My whole heart was breaking, and there was no way my face could hide it. I didn’t want to talk to people about this. I really needed to get away, but I was in jail. I couldn’t just leave without a reason, but I had no desire to share it with any one. That would make it more real. From the time I made my mom repeat everything, I had begged God to make this fake news.
I got up and went and spoke with the Lt king. He and Deftone shared an office. We had become friends during my sentence. Besides a game of H.o.r.s.e that I handled him on and him tasing me one day and blaming it on an electrical outlet (that was a foot away from the charge), we always got along. I trusted him; we had spoken about deep life things. I knew he cared for me. I went in and through tears told him that I really needed to get to my room and needed a break. His eyes were full of compassion. He simply shook his head yes and said, “Ok.”
To this day, I’m thankful that I didn’t have to get into it then. When I arrived to my bed, every emotion in my body came flooding out in tears and gasps. She was really gone, and here I was stuck in jail. I was a loser. I couldn’t even be there for my family, always missing things in rehab or jail. I felt a deep emptiness right between my heart and throat. That may not seem like a big area, but to me, that day, a whole ocean of painful nothingness was able to fit in it. Nothing I thought could fill the void. My mama had loved me through every hard day, and now, on her hardest day, I couldn’t be there to love her. This began a time of great contemplation.
As I grieved my precious Mamaw, I felt so lost. I was alone. I was scared, but then a peace came and correct thought prevailed. My Mamaw had known I loved her. I may have been locked up when she passed, but that did not take away from the years of love we had shared. More importantly, God reminded me that I am lovable. I was the most alone I had ever been, but in-between whimpers, I was able to recall her holding my hand for 90 minutes straight during visitation. I could see her adoring eyes as she touched my face, while we talked. It was like I could feel her and see her all over again.
The woman I saw in my head was not ashamed of having a grandson in lock-up. On the contrary, she was proud of me. My existence, was one her favorite things about the world. I felt shame in the fact that I was in jail when she passed, but she felt no shame in me that I was in jail when she was alive. Just like so many times before, God used the heart of an uneducated, old woman to teach me about His heart. I am His child. This familial relationship is just as real as the familial relationship I had with Mamaw. Both relationships have been bonded through blood. One from the blood running through our veins; the other from His Son’s blood being spilt.
Before these thoughts, I had enough self-loathing to be able to have several servings before the pan ran dry. I didn’t have much Bardin love in that moment. The Bardin, I hated, didn’t exist when my Mamaw looked at me. Why couldn’t I be that guy all the time?
I still miss her everyday. I miss laughing with her, but more importantly, I miss the way she made me feel about myself. I keep these memories with me, because sometimes, I will still start to hate me. All I have to do is remember there was a woman, who loved me and was proud of the man I am. She was a woman of prayer, a woman of faith. She was a legend, and I am her legacy.
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