Busy hands surround my wife and me these days. Recent bad news has brought the need for friends to reach out and want to help us get through it. “I’m so sorry,” they say. “What can I do?” Our reply, just like most people’s is “Nothing. Thank you. We’re all set,” and they reply with, “Well, let me at least bring dinner.” The need to do something to feel helpful. The need for busy hands, which means we’re evaluating casseroles right now and different grilled meats. We joke that we’ll rate the best online.
You see, my mother-in-law died last week. Lee Nowell Radford. She was born and raised in Georgia and moved to North Carolina as a young married woman with her husband of what would have been 65 years in June. He worked for IBM, and Lee kept busy at many important things throughout those years, not the least was raising three wonderful children. Her middle child caught my attention many years ago, and I remember returning an umbrella that my now wife left in my car on one of our first dates. I was hoping to see her when I returned the umbrella, but Lee answered the front door, told me her daughter was not there, and she and I talked on the front porch for a long, long while. I remember being impressed by her, her worldly knowledge, her thoughts on the various things we chatted about and her ability to simply talk. She was quite good at it. Her husband often said that he was hard of hearing because his ears had simply worn out.
Lee had been struggling with cancer for a while, and it recently it became clear the end was near. My wife travelled to and from Raleigh many times over the past six months, and when the doctors said they’d done all they could, my wife headed up to Raleigh for longer visits. Even though the end was foretold, standing bedside over a mother who has just died is difficult. I remember this well from my own mother’s death a few years ago. You can anticipate the end many times over, but the finality of it in that moment is, well, devastating. It was for me, and it was for my wife. You ache when you see loved ones deep in grief, wishing you could do something to take that grief from them and bear it yourself. You can’t, of course, so you do what seems to come next – busy hands. You clean, cook, arrange for support, walk their dog - anything to feel helpful.
My family of six will head to Raleigh Sunday for the Monday funeral. We’ll be coming from two different cities with five different flight itineraries. There, everyone will gather and grieve together: a widower, siblings, aunts, uncles, in-laws, first and second cousins, plus my mother in law’s friends and neighbors whose hands I’ve shaken many times over the years. There will be lots of tears, a few smiles, maybe a laugh and lots of sad and busy hands.
I’m Cam Marston, and I’m just trying to keep it real.
