Dear Momma: Love Letters to Heaven
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“Call your mother,” John says as he is dialing the coroner. No answer at home. “Yes. Yes. When was this?” It is coming to him now and tears fill his eyes. I do not believe, but a coldness is overtaking me. “Trish,” he chokes out, “your mother was killed today pulling out of the grocery store parking lot.”
And so began a year of journaling my grief, a year’s journey without my sweet 93-year-old Momma who had lived in our home for 28 years. No more old-timey banana pudding, no more trips with her to Charleston to see her younger (then 90 years old) sister, no more listening to her infectious laugh or working together on baby quilts. Momma was gone.
I always wished that the Lord would just take her quietly one night as she drifted off to sleep after watching her beloved Atlanta Braves game, or after an Easter egg hunt with her precious great-grandchildren, or after a walk at sunset on Pawley’s Island. He did not choose a quiet moment. She was instantly killed in a violent traffic accident pulling out of a grocery store parking lot, on her way home to cook supper for me and John as we returned home from New Orleans.
She missed a year of happy family events: grandson Joseph graduating from college and the whirl of his marriage that summer, a cowgirl birthday party for great-granddaughter Clary, the baptism of John Michael Gale Dunaway, dance recitals with great-grands Marion Alice and Audie Brooks, Jack’s soccer games and the excitement of hugging Toby, the mascot at Mercer University basketball games with Charlie John.
And we missed her. Now, more than three years later, I still think of her every day. I am her only child. She loved me as purely as any mother can. I keep a stack of family pictures in the sweetgrass basket beside her plate at our supper table. I dream about her. I pass over her death site every day going to work.
I am still healing. Our Lord is faithful—in joy and in sorrow. He was faithful to me in my time of deep distress and in the loneliness that follows the death of a loved one. I’m sharing with you portions of my “Momma book,” my journal through that first year following her death. The Bible says all believers are saints by calling. She was a remarkable saint. I pray my words will give you comfort and remind you that the God of all comfort is always there, loving us, guiding us and taking our hand at death to cross over that great divide into the Promised Land.
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About the Book
One hot July day, on a return trip home from New Orleans, Trish Dunaway received a call from Mercer University police: “Call your mother.” As the minutes raced by, she learned the tragic news: her ninety-three-year-old mother had been instantly killed in a traffic accident.
Her mother’s story is a remarkable one: growing up in the 1920s in the Charleston, South Carolina Orphan House, losing her husband to cancer as a young married woman, and growing into a much-loved and honored prayer warrior.
Trish gave herself a year to journal her grief. Through prayer, the ministry of the saints, journaling and poetry, Scripture, and memories of her Low Country heritage, she learned to choose God’s comfort He offered through a walk into His mercy and grace.
She shares her journey during the year following her mother’s death as she learns how God teaches us to listen for His comfort in the face of despair.
About the Author
Trish Dunaway is a National Board Certified teacher of the gifted in Macon, Georgia. Her husband, John, is a professor of French at Mercer University. They have three children and six grandchildren. Her faith journey is the heart of this, her first published book.