THINKING OF HEAVEN BRINGS ME great joy. Thinking of the people that I’m going to see and the hugs I’m going to get, there is no way I’ll be able to sit in one place. When I get on that heavenly shore, I pray there’ll a heavenly Uber.
The first person I want to see will be my aunt Gen. She was born Lilly Virginia but went by Gen, and my mother called me Little Gen most of my life because we both danced to the beat of our own tuba. Aunt Gen was my mother’s best friend and older sister. She had an unmatched love for life, her family, and big jewelry. My mother was queen of the kitchen, but my aunt had one food that she’d mastered over my mother’s—biscuits!
I can remember going into her house and her saying, “Ellen, get in my kitchen and get yourself a good biscuit. You poor thing, you probably don’t even know what a good one tastes like.” I’d walk into her kitchen and see a cast-iron skillet full of biscuits. They tasted like nothing I’d ever had in my life—a little crisp on the top and bottom, and soft as pillows in the middle. I like to have died. My aunt laughed. “You poor baby, you just eat your mom’s thin little floury biscuits.”
Technically, there is nothing wrong with my mom’s biscuits, but to understand how hard we had it, when the frozen biscuits came on the market, my mom bought some and served them one morning. My older brother, Matthew, had one and said, “Where are these from?” and Mom said, “I made those,” looking at me to see what he would say. My brother said, “You mean to tell me that you’ve known how to make biscuits that taste like this the whole time, and you just haven’t?!”
I knew days before Aunt Gen passed that it was the end. She had a heart episode1 and was unconscious at the hospital. My husband said, “Aunt Gen has so much here to live for; she’s going to pull through.” Aunt Gen might have had a lot of family on earth worth living for, but heaven had the one person she longed to see again: Kimberly. Kimberly was my aunt Gen’s granddaughter and my first cousin’s only daughter. We lost her in a hit-and-run accident that forever changed our family. From that day on, our family history was divided into two sections: our life before Kimberly’s death and life after.
When Aunt Gen passed, we knew she had found perfect healing and was kicking up gold dust with her grandbaby.
When I think of seeing her in heaven someday, I picture her and Kimberly in the kitchen, and we’ll all sit down and enjoy biscuits and thick slab bacon. There are no calories in heaven, which will make the biscuits all the more sweet.
After we visit with my aunt and cousin, I know I’ll see my grandmother and great-grandmother, and for the first time, my great-grandmother will know who I am and whose I am! Because when I’d visited her in the nursing home, she didn’t remember. That’s why, before each visit, my mom would give marchin’ orders: “Don’t forget—Grandma is senile, so she won’t know who you are, but you be sweet anyway.”2
I know that in heaven I’ll see Great-Grandma Keith, my mother’s grandmother, who was already quite old by the time I was born. My grandma Iris, my mother’s mother, will make me feel like I’m her favorite just like she does with all of the cousins. I’ll bake a caramel cake with my grandma Jennie Mae, and I’ll see Tim’s parents. I have always wondered what Tim’s mom would think about Meg and Nik. I take that back—I’ve always known that she would have loved our kids. Neither looks like me—I was just a vessel to make little Skrmetti children. She would take pride knowing that Nik enjoys cooking in the kitchen just like her little boy did with her. She’d love knowing that Meg sold pies to buy a guitar, and that Nik once had a preschool report that read, “Ok except for saying the D-word.”
After a good visit, I’ll be on my way to find Ms. Judy, who was my best friend’s mother and our town’s favorite first-grade teacher. She was one of my many second mamas that helped raise me. Now that I’m a mom, I know that behind every great mom are about a dozen second mamas that help fill in the gaps for each other. After a hug from Ms. Judy, I’ll be off to find Ms. Emma Street. Ms. Emma taught my mother math in high school and my dad at Northeast Mississippi Community College, so when I started falling behind in math, she was their first call. Ms. Emma was never married, she had blond hair, and her signature color was royal blue. I can’t tell you if she ever wore makeup because blue lit up her beautiful face.
She was also a thrifty lady. A child of the Depression, she didn’t let anything go to waste. Her home was lit with lanterns to conserve energy, and I did math equations on every piece of scratch paper known to man! Old shopping lists and the margins of the newspaper were plenty fine for long division. She would always give me a dime for my hard work. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was the ’80s, and a dime was more like… A DIME! It felt the same as a dime does now, but it was sweeter coming from Ms. Emma.
I picture that after I run into Ms. Emma, I’m sure to find more of the sweet old people from my church. I hope I run into Mr. and Mrs. Meadows—my first Sunday school teachers. I don’t remember much about them except how much they loved us little kids. On special Sundays, Mr. Meadows would bring an apple and slice it with his pocketknife. And sweet Ms. Buela Jones! She was our daycare director, and she watched every single kid grow up. The first time I brought Tim to church, when the service was over, she asked him, “Are you as good as you look?” And I can’t forget Mr. Phil. He lived alone, and the entire congregation was his caretaker. He walked to and from church, but if there was ever bad weather, he could count on a church member to swing by and pick him up and bring him to service. I’m not sure what the correct diagnosis was for Mr. Phil, but I knew that he was mentally disabled in some way and that he was gentle as a lamb. He sang in the choir and never missed a Wednesday-night practice, and he made sure no one else did either. You could set your clock to his Tuesday-night reminders. I can still hear the phone ringing, and, without caller ID, my mom would say, “Grab that phone; it’s Phil reminding me about choir practice. Just be nice and tell him you’ll tell me and thank him for calling.” Sure as the world—it was always him.
These are only a handful of the people I’m longing to see. When I think of the one thing that binds these people together, I think of time. Each of these people spent time with me. My aunt in making biscuits and loving me. Ms. Emma gave up one night a week to make math less scary and spoke with me every Sunday and Wednesday night at church. Mr. Phil spent every Tuesday night making sure that our church had a full choir practice.
Thinking of these sweet people from church makes me embarrassed at all the times I’m urging my family to run to the car to get out of the parking lot before the rush to the exit, change clothes for sports, or beat the Baptists to the buffet. What I see as talkin’ after church is really fellowship, and I’m missing it. If I don’t slow down, the sweet kids at my church are going to see me in heaven and tell their heavenly Uber, “Keep driving—that’s the crazy old lady that’s always rushing to her car.”
1 In the South, we never give full details. Everything is either an episode or a spell. Episodes are longer than spells. Both can be minor or fatal.
2 In the ’80s, senile was a commonly used term for an older person who was losing their memory. I assumed that my family used the word because it was less scary than official medical terms.