Prayers for Mema

My mom called this morning to let me know that Mema, her mother, has been admitted to the hospital and may have to undergo emergency surgery for an obstruction in her colon. Mema is almost 88 years old and has suffered with numerous things in the past few years including COPD resulting in being on full time oxygen and a stroke which caused her to have to move in with my mom and dad. She's very frail, has dementia and is not a good patient. She doesn't like to be told what to do and is very headstrong. Also, surgery for her is very dangerous considering her age but also the COPD makes being under for surgery risky. Please pray for her and my mom if you will. My mom has been through a lot with my grandmother and watching her age has been straining on my mother.

Mema is actually my great grandmother who adopted my mom and my two aunts when they were little girls. Mema hasn't ever liked for everyone to know this because in a different time, it was harder to talk of such things. I think she is an amazing woman who has fought her whole life for the survival of not just herself but those whom she loved. I'm not sure I would be here today had she not saved my mother and for that, I respectfully go against her wishes to tell of the great thing she did. I am proud that Mema is my great grandmother and my grandmother in one. It is a wonderful blessing.

Mema went away from home to work when she was only 12 years old. Born in 1920, she was just the right age to work when the Great Depression was in full swing. She said it was hard to know when the depression hit because they were always poor. Once when I was staying with her when I was about 12, we were up in the middle of the night because it was storming terribly and then she lived in a mobile home so tornadoes were a big danger. She told me of when she was a child how she would dream she was eating a Milky Way bar, something she hardly ever got, and that she would wake up, realize it was a dream and then try hard to fall back to sleep and dream of that Milky Way. She rarely talks of her childhood and even then I knew how special it was for her to tell me these things. She's a hard woman with little affection but she has never forgotten to send me a birthday card. Once she forgot to get me a Christmas present but it was just funny. She just had too many grand kids.

As an adult it's easy to see why she doesn't show a great deal of tenderness. She has had a tough row to hoe. Quite literally at times. When she had to leave home to go work, her job was to chop cotton. Thankfully I've never done that and hopefully never will because it sounds like murder. She was a welder during WWII, a telephone pioneer for AT&T which was simply "the phone company," and a Wal-mart greeter when I was a child. There is so much she has been and is that I will never know. She's always dreaded getting older and even the last time I saw her a few weeks ago she was explaining to me how she is still not an old lady. :o)

Please pray that she and my mother are comforted.