Mama: Thanksgiving 2013 (3-part series)
Serenity in the Ethiopian highlands
On Thanksgiving Day of 2013, most of you were gathered with your loved ones, grubbing on some delicious mac & cheese, and choking on some dry turkey. (No offense to whomever makes your family turkey, they could be the best chef; it’s just an undisputed fact that roasted turkey is a dry, choking hazard.)
Meanwhile, I was in the hospital in Kentucky sitting next to my dying mom, my best friend. After mom’s latest post-chemo scan showed that the pancreatic cancer hadn’t regressed but instead spread, she made the difficult decision to stop chemo and focus on her spirituality and peace in her final days. After learning about an Ethiopian Orthodox church in Kentucky where there were healing holy waters, my mom, dad, and her youngest sister decided to head out to Kentucky. And it is during this pilgrimage that my mom’s health continued to deteriorate, landing her in a hospital in the middle of a State that just gels into 90% of the US for us New Yorkers.
So, here I was next to her in her hospital room when she dropped a bombshell on me. “When I die, I want to be buried in Menagesha,” my mom shared. Menagesha is a town approximately 20-miles northwest of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city. It’s a beautiful forest town and there are peaceful, beautiful churches there. But Mom’s news rocked my world. First of all, I wasn’t ready to let her go. Buried? Why are we talking about this? Moreover, Menagesha? As my middle school best friend used to say, “What is even that?” Supposing she did lose the battle, how was I even supposed to visit her gravesite?
A week later, my mom passed and shortly after that, she was buried in Menagesha according to her wishes. That was the first of my several visits —and eventual settlement— in Addis Ababa after her passing. Nearly 10-years later, my mom became one of the quiet, magnetic forces that pulled my family to our roots: Ethiopia.
There are times in our lives when we cannot see the bigger picture. In those moments, the decisions that God makes seem cruel and unusual. But much like the show This Is Us (any TIU fans out there?), puzzle pieces reveal themselves in time to be an even more perfect fit than we’d ever imagined possible.