I am a stranger

Gen 23:4 'I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a burying-place with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.'

I feel so sad today. I think it's because I feel feel like a stranger. I don't belong here. My aunt Mary died last week. I spoke with my mother last week and she told me she's depressed since she left here and went back home to Detroit. I asked her why she would be depressed, her cousin Mary was sick and she didn't know how sick she was until she returned home. Last week Mary was in a coma by the time I talked to my mother she had died.

Mary was one of the family matriarch that rallied around my mom when I lay sick in the hospital nine hundred miles away last year. She was also present when I went home for the family reunion last year just a month after leaving the hospital. I remember how happy my aunties were to see me alive and well. Now just over a year later two of the women in that circle have died. My mother's sister and her first cousin both of whom we loved dearly.

I called my mother and she didn't mention the funeral so I asked her was it sad. She told me she didn't go. I asked her why not and she said she just couldn't do it. I read between the lines. It's getting harder for my mother to deal with the death of the people she's close to, people she played jump rope and ice skated with as a child. They have saw each others through much of life ups and downs. Now they're gone. They were not only family they were her friends and support system. They are all leaving her one by one. Perhaps she's thinking about her own immortality.

My dad died in Feb 2007. I have mostly gotten pass the sadness, but last week I actually forgot for a minute that he's not here to talk to. I had the thought that I should call him, and for a brief overwhelming second I thought I could. That's when the sadness came. I know I'm a sojourner in this place, a ghetto pilgrim looking for a place to bury my dead, longing for a time that I will see them again.

I am a stranger in this land,

Fearless