It was just over a year after my enshrinement into the Hall of Fame. An early autumn day in New York City.
Brooklyn Hospital is located off Flatbush Avenue on the west side of Fort Greene Park. A large bay window in Mom’s room overlooked the park, the very place she’d once brought me and my brothers on summer outings. Turning toward it, I could see the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument, where I’d fallen and broken my arm when I was a kid.
I remembered Mom trying to straighten it when it became stuck at dinner, the fork near my mouth. A faint, sad smile touched my lips.
I stared outside for several minutes and then looked back at Mom, lying in her bed, breathing shallowly, the blanket and bed sheet pulled up over her shrunken body. She’d been in and out of hospitals for years, stoic as ever, as she fought the ravages of bone cancer. In and out, undergoing treatments, surgeries, never a word of complaint.
I’d brought a CD player to the care center where she’d been living before her fragile condition took a downturn. When I visited her there, I would put on Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland, all her favorites. I wanted Mom to enjoy her gospel music.
But here, the ICU was quiet.
I sat there looking at her. I’d spent many hours visiting her after her surgeries and treatments. But I felt this time was different. I felt it would be the last time I would ever see her. She was too frail to sit up, to eat, and almost too weak to open her eyes. She could barely even talk. Her ordeal, her suffering, had taken a toll.
I visited the New York area fairly often from my home in Georgia. There were special functions and charitable events, some associated with the Knicks or Hall of Fame, others sponsored by athletes or celebrities. When possible, I was glad to help out.
This time I’d come in for a fund-raiser in Westchester, a golf tournament, and I had taken an early flight so I could spend some time with my mother.
I arrived at the hospital before visiting hours. At first, they wouldn’t let me up to see her. But when I’d explained I was only in town for a short while, the staff made an exception.
I talked to her a lot that day. I don’t recall much of what I said. I was just trying cheer her up with stories about Amina, childhood reminiscences… whatever filled the sterile hospital room silence. She was too weak to respond or contribute stories of her own. At times, I wasn’t even sure she heard me. But I kept talking to her. I truly believed I would not have another opportunity.
After a while, I had to leave for the tournament. Mom had been drifting off, and I thought it might be best to let her sleep.
I rose off my chair and was about to kiss her goodbye, when I saw her lips moving slightly… almost too slightly to notice. She was trying to talk, but couldn’t muster a voice.
I leaned forward, put my ear to her lips, waited.
“I love you, son,” she whispered.
Then she settled into sleep.
I stood up, looking at her, holding on to the back of my chair. The walls of my throat were thick. But I felt something inside me. In my chest. If someone had asked me to describe it, I couldn’t have. Not right at that moment.
I kissed Mom’s cheek, told her I loved her, and turned toward the door.
I had to go.
When I reached the golf course, I found a quiet knoll and sat in the shade of a tree for a while, away from everyone else. And I cried.
“Lord, take your arms to our mother,” I said. “It’s time for her to go home.”
But I need to mention something.
As I went to join the tournament’s golfers, walking across the neatly manicured green, I finally understood the feeling I’d had at her bedside.
I was filling up. My heart was filling up. The emptiness within was gone. It had been replaced with love.
Only Mom could have done that for me. And she knew it.
I love you, son.
I’d waited to hear those words my entire life. And wrapped within those words was a hug.
The greatest gifts in life don’t come easy. I really do think they aren’t meant to. But we need to be ready for them. We need to recognize them when they appear to us. Like an eight-year-old kid standing under a basketball hoop in an elementary school cafeteria, the ball too large for his hands, the rim high above his head, we need to look up, always up, and realize that when the great gifts come, you need to be ready for them, because they can sweep you into a lofty realm you never thought existed.
A world where paths merge in an unexpected journey, and you are made anew.
Bernard King