A Collection of Life Stories for Those Who Believe

(And Especially for Those Who Don’t)

By Sandy Samples-Jones

SUPERMOM

“UNLIKELY ANGEL”

My Momma was the greatest, most natural beauty I have ever known or will probably ever know. Her name was Dorothy, but everyone called her Dottie. I was the only child for 15 years and there was only 16 years age difference between us, so she was my Mom/Soul Sister/Best Friend and I was lost without her. When I was on the road for all those years….I called her every day. We might not have any news but we talked every day….she was an essential part of my being. When I was 15, a childhood prayer was finally answered and God gave me a baby brother and three years later, another baby brother. And Momma was the quintessential mother bear….do anything you wanted to her but don’t even think about “saying” anything bad about one of her cubs…she’d come at you now!

My Daddy died on my 24^th birthday….and my little brothers were 6 and 9. Mom spent the next 25 years with a single purpose….raise the boys and try to keep me straight…and even when life would seem so lonely she wanted to scream, she never wavered in her job. But God decided that 25 years was long enough for these two star-crossed lovers to be apart. She loved my Dad and that love built a bridge back to him.

Mom had a heart attack and spent 11 weeks….77 days exactly…. in the hospital as the doctors tried to stop what God had put into motion. The first day of the 77, we found ourselves scared to death outside the ICU as they tried to get her stabilized and the first nurse to come and tell us anything was a guy named Al who sported an aging hippy look all the way down to his gray hair…which by the way, was tied up in a pony tail. He told us that he needed to let us know how very ill Mom was, and even though she would likely pull through that evening, he really didn’t think that she would recover in the long run. Well!! It was the last durn thing my brothers and I wanted to hear at that exact moment and we ended up getting old Al and his “doomsday” self booted off the ward and instructed never to come around my momma again. Al’s answer to his bedside manner was that he was just trying to prepare us…because we looked like we needed preparing.

We never saw Al again until the night before Mom died. And quite frankly, I think the only reason Momma hung on for 77 days through open heart surgery and kidney failure and you name it, was because she thought we looked like we needed some more preparing. Mom would not have left if she didn’t know that us kids were going to be alright. For the 77 long agonizing days my brothers and I had stayed round the clock with her….my brother, Bruce from 8am to 4pm and my brother, Buck from midnight to 8am and I had the 4pm to midnight shift. I had just settled in with Mom around 7pm that night when Al walked onto the ward and, sure enough, had been assigned to take care of Mom overnight. When I saw him, I started sobbing and told Al that I was so sorry for what had happened on that first night and Al told me not to worry…he could honestly tell me tonight that Mom was going to be alright. And the next day she went to be with Jesus and to finally have the reunion she had been praying for the past 25 years with her Tom. But, I swear y’all, I still say that Al was the most unlikely looking Angel that I know now he was