Birthday cards, improv comedy classes and grieving the loss of my mamaw | Opinion
I’ve started taking an improvisational comedy class. I guess I’m at the age now where that’s something I’m not only actively seeking out but am also finding myself enjoying.
During my latest class, our instructor had us do a visualization exercise; the point of it was to visualize a space, a scene in which we would have to draw upon certain emotions that would help us craft characters, or personas.
At one point during the exercise, my fellow classmates and I found ourselves traversing a castle and we came upon a grand banquet hall with a long table cutting through the room that was adorned with all our favorite foods and drinks.
What immediately came to mind for me was my mamaw’s chicken and dumplings, her mashed potatoes and a dessert of peach cobbler. With these memories flooding my brain, I began to cry.
On the day of that class, it hadn’t been a full month since my mamaw, Charlene Newman, died at the age of 90 on Feb. 9 of this year. All things considered, it’s not odd at all that the loss of her is still fresh in my mind, so I found myself going deeper into this castle of memories.
As the exercise continued, the instructor gave us another prompt I didn’t quite catch at first but regardless of what it was, I found myself looking at my mamaw and papaw’s home out near Carter City in Carter County.
Their home was a single-story house that sat atop of a small hill very close to Kentucky Route 2. It was, by all accounts, a rather plain looking house on the outside, but the concrete porch which stretches the whole front length of the home was a big selling point. There is a hill behind the house, and I remember mamaw and papaw buying goats one year to eat the underbrush on the hill. I don’t think the goats were very good at that.
The house sits next to an old barn and is across the creek from the farm where my papaw grew tobacco and raised cattle. When the season came, my mamaw would help cut the tobacco.
I can see the house clearly, remembering the days spent on that porch in a rocking chair, going down to the creek, playing badminton in the front yard.
At my mamaw’s funeral, I asked my cousin Ashley why we played so much badminton growing up; neither of us really knew why, but maybe because the birdie was less likely to fall down into the road, although it still landed on the roof more often than not.
Mamaw’s funeral procession took us by the house, and other places important to her like Carter Caves State Resort Park where she worked some several odd decades. She retired, then went back, then left for good so she could better take care of my papaw after his stroke. He died in 2010 at the age of 75. The two of them had been married over 50 years.
Whoever bought that house of theirs, bless their hearts, they ruined the porch by enclosing the whole thing. I hate to say they ruined it, but it’s true.
Of course, a lot of the area around there had already been ruined a good decade or so before when they put in a rock crusher not too far up the road. The once luscious green hillside I could remember from my childhood is nothing more but a heap of gravel and dust carried on the winds.
I think a big reason mamaw struggled with COPD the last 10 or so years is because of the rock dust blowing down and settling in the valley around the house. She was on oxygen for several years.
Mamaw spent a good chunk of her last few years telling us she was ready to die. She wasn’t reserved about it in the slightest. One Thanksgiving at the senior living apartment she moved into after selling the house and farm, she got up from the couch, went over to a drawer and produced the note she had written out detailing her funeral arrangements.
She would often argue with her doctors, not because she was in poor health but because of what good health she was in for her age. She had her quirks like that.
One time, she insisted a blood pressure medication she was taking wasn’t helping her and she had the numbers to prove it— she would sit at the kitchen table and take her blood pressure several times within the hour. Her doctor was adamant that she was in excellent health, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was though! Even just a couple months prior to her death she was still getting along with very little problem, but at 90 things catch up.
Her comfort in taking that final plunge beyond our world was buoyed by her faith in God. She was a woman of strong faith, she was also a woman who had experienced the loss of her husband, siblings, a granddaughter, a son-in-law (my dad) and many others. To her it seemed more a matter of being reunited with those loved ones in heaven than prolonging her suffering on earth.
On the last day I saw mamaw in the hospital, before she entered hospice care, I was in the room with her, my mom and several of my aunts and uncles when the doctor came in to speak with her. He gave the prognosis and she made her decision. That’s when she told us, “It’s not what you take with you, it’s what you leave behind.”
One of the more physical things she leaves behind are birthday cards. Every year since I left home to start college, graduated and then moved to Louisville, she’s sent me a birthday card without fail. Many of them had a return address by the name “Mamaw Newman,” not Charlene.
This year, as I turn 29, I won’t get a card from her on my birthday. I won’t see anything in my mailbox from “Mamaw Newman,” won’t open a card to find her small, neat cursive handwriting telling me she loves me. She’s left behind years worth of cards for me, but I’ll still be waiting every birthday for another one that won’t come.
It’s never enough, is it? Never enough time and never enough birthday cards. We greedily never want it to end, but it does, it has to eventually.
On my birthday, I will grieve the loss of my mamaw, and my dad who has been gone five years now. I will grieve for the time I won’t get with them and I will do so knowing in my heart that while I miss them it remains a privilege and an honor to have loved them, to have known them and to have lived part of my life with them at my side.
If I’ve learned one thing about grief as an adult in the years since my dad died, it’s that grief comes in waves and you never know when high tide will hit you next. You never know how grief will sneak up on you and how long it will stay. Best to plant yourself firmly in the sand and let it wash over you. Will it hurt? Yes. It will sting in your chest, but you are alive. Grief makes companions of us all.
This birthday, I won’t have a card in my mailbox from my mamaw. But what she’s left behind for me — lessons in love and faith — more than suffices.
This story was originally published March 6, 2025 at 1:00 AM.
