Mama—Lucy Mae Stokes Archer

On this mother’s day, I feel very grateful for so many people who have “mothered me” through my life. My older sisters- Elberta, Billie, Sarah, Mary and my grandmother. I was truly raised by a village.

Today I remember them all including my own mother, Lucy Mae Stokes Archer, who died early in the morning on December 11, 1998. She had had a stroke right before Thanksgiving: she’d been in our small town hospital ever since—just laying there. (Mama had always said she didn’t want to be “Laying up there hooked up”). So, all of us girls had agreed to let her go – except Mary who just couldn’t do it.

So we waited for Mary. And on that Thursday night, she had called everybody to say that we could tell the hospital to unhook Mama. I made plane reservations right then to fly into Midland, rent a car and go directly to the hospital the next day. I was on the last plane into Midland because of a bad snow storm. It was rough.

But it was like Mama knew that Mary had let go and she slipped away at 2:00 that morning. I wrote this poem a long time after that Friday in 1998.

The Day Mama Died

                                                Carol Mae Archer

It was good driving through the snow

the old ones were there            their souls were thick in the air

        filling my nostrils with their lives

I tasted their lives as they came for their own

She belongs with them and they rocked her in their cloak of primitive Baptist wells

and took her home.

 It wasn’t easy.  She always knew it wouldn’t be

  but she didn’t know they’d come for her

That they’d not leave her to make that final leg alone.

She thought we’d do it                but we weren’t there.

            They were

                                    the old ones

their souls shining in love and God’s light.