I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other, then someone at my side says: “There, she is gone.” “Gone where?” Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side.
—Henry Van Dyke
In the winter and spring months of 1968, Mama never told me she was dying. There were no conversations about moving on without her. We never reminisced or recapitulated. We never talked about what she might want me to tell my children one day when they asked who she was and what kind of grandmother she would have been. Perhaps she had hope until the final moments of her life and was unable to accept her destiny. More likely, she didn’t want to burden me as I was preparing to graduate from high school.
“Peggy Sue, pinch me, I must be dreaming.” May 3, 1966.
Mama did not live long enough to tell her own story. There were no diaries, no handwritten letters to us, no family movies, and only a few family photographs scattered about. The person that my mama was, and the person she could have become had she lived, will always elude me. The author Anita Smith described Mama as a “Lady of Courage” in her book The Intimate Story of Lurleen Wallace: Her Crusade of Courage. Ron Gibson, the book’s editor, wrote in the introduction: “She rushed onto the stage of history only in time for a brief, if nonetheless memorable, performance before the lights went out. The audience applauded her dignity in the role in which she was cast—that of the protagonist of cancer. It is because the reader will come to know such a figure, tragic as her circumstance may finally have been, that this is not a sad book. It is a happy book.”
Mama’s deification through her suffering and death overshadowed her life. And for those who loved their Lady of Courage, there was no reason to defend her individual accomplishments as governor of Alabama, to investigate how her shortcomings made her who she was, or to set her free on the pages of history. To them, her nobility lay next to her in her grave.
The real story of Mama’s life became irrelevant to history, and eventually even to our own family. We all too often circled the wagons to protect the memory of the Lady of Courage rather than celebrate who she was. I became accustomed to not looking beyond the stories that we always told, the ones with a punchline rather than those with depth.
Much of what we had been as a family died with Mama. There were no more vacations, Christmas lists, birthday cakes, or joyful moments. We didn’t know how to do those things without her.
Back in Clayton, when I was young, Mama would sometimes come to visit the make-believe houses I would scratch out with a tree limb or broom handle on the dirt floor of our sagging garage. She helped make my floor plan more livable. She brought glasses of Kool-Aid for the two of us, and we would sit in metal yard chairs in my “living room.”
“One day you will have a real house,” she would say. “So when I come to visit be sure you have a room for me.” I always promised I would.
In 1977, I moved into a real house of my own, and in June 1978, I brought Mama’s grandson, Leigh Chancellor Kennedy, home to live in what would have been her room. Leigh’s serene curiosity was unruffled and unafraid. His deep cerulean eyes seemed to look beyond me as if they were contemplating some universal truth.
A decade later, our son Morgan Burns Kennedy was born. His eyes narrowed when something went awry. His smiles were discreet. There was no doubt in my mind that Burns Kennedy had the “no monkey business around here” soul of Mamaw. He would have her “tell it like it is, ain’t no use in sugarcoating it” personality.
In a moment of wishing that Mama could be there with me as I was rocking Burns in my arms, I began to think how things might have been different if she had declined to run for governor. Why would she have chosen politics over us when she had so little time? The nights and days she stood on a makeshift stage shaking hands with strangers were days and nights I was at home alone. I envied friends who shopped with their mother, went to a picture show, got their daddy to help them with their algebra.
When Burns became animated and restless in my arms and stared at me through squinting eyes, his hands balled up in boxer style, I wished I could call on Mamaw and Mama. I pulled him close to comfort him but he was comfortless. He was upset but not crying. “Are you about to pitch a fit?” I asked. “How I wish I could ask Mamaw and Mama what to do with you! But they left you and me a long time ago, so I guess it’s just us.”
Burns relaxed and with his eyes wide open looked straight into mine. It was as if he understood what I said but disagreed with my opinion. Then somewhere in my heart, I came to understand that all that Mama did, she had done for us. Lurleen Wallace was a woman of courage because of her life rather than a Lady of Courage because of her death.
I dream about standing in the shallows of the Alabama Gulf with Mama as she casts her rod toward the sky. The silver spinner catches the last light as it arcs up and over the water.
“Here, hold the rod for me for a second.” Mama says as she cups her hand around a cigarette lighter to fend off a breeze. “Let’s get lucky. What do you think?”
“Yep, let’s get lucky,” I reply with a smile.
“See that biggest ship heading through the pass?” she asks as she points toward the water. “Watch it now, as it heads out to sea. It will look like it’s getting smaller and smaller, but it will always stay the same. That’s because of the way we see it, not because of the way it really is.”
“Are we like that ship?” I ask. “We are always the same, even if we are very far away and even when no one can see us?”
“I think we are.”
My mother was reminding me that she would always be there with me in spirit. She would endure in my heart as the mother I loved. That would never change.
In April 1968, a few weeks before she died, Mama called me to her room. It was the night of the senior prom. “Turn around,” she said as I walked through the door. “Mary Jo showed me the material she was going to use to make your dress. Come closer so I can see how lovely you are. Now turn around so I can see the back. Come sit by me. I have something for you.”
Mama reached beneath the cover and retrieved a small gift box. “This is your graduation present, but I am so excited about all of this that I just can’t wait that long, and I knew they would look so pretty with your dress. I can’t wait to see them on you.”
I took the pair of small diamond earrings from the box and put them on.
“Now, keep your hair pulled back so everyone can see them. Give me a kiss and go have some fun.” Mama lay back on the pillow. “I want to hear all about it real soon.”
I never got to tell Mama about that night. I sometimes wish I could have. Some years later, I took those earrings and had them mounted on either side of the diamond in my engagement ring to remind me of the night Mama said goodbye.
“This is where your grandmother walked …” Me, Leigh, and Burns in Gulf Shores, Alabama, 1990.