When my parents, Grover and Jean Journey, moved back to Birmingham after living in Tuscaloosa for almost four decades, Dad decided to sell their burial plots in Tuscaloosa and buy plots at Elmwood, Birmingham’s sprawling historic cemetery. As he put it, “I don’t want your mother traipsing by herself back and forth to Tuscaloosa all the time to visit my grave if I go before she does.” They bought four plots. On my next visit to Birmingham, Mother was anxious to show where she and Dad would be laid to rest (and where I would lie if I decided to take advantage of one of the two extra plots). As Mom walked across the cemetery lawn to find the exact location of their new real estate, I thought this scene will come back to haunt me one day.

Dad passed away in 2016 and he was right: for a long time, Mom “traipsed” out to Elmwood daily, usually alone, to visit Dad’s grave. Mother died ten years after Dad, on June 22 of this year, one day before she would have turned 92. I had been staying with her full time as a caregiver for over four years and had watched as her health declined and her energy and spirit waned. You think you’re prepared, but I’m not sure that you ever really are. Her passing was peaceful and, as far as I can tell, painless.  She died at her home; I was there along with my brother, Rick, and his wife, Jennifer; and she knew that her great friends, Virginia and Herbert Thomas (Mom’s favorite pastor), and their daughter Cindy were on their way from Tuscaloosa for a visit.

The service on June 26 was simple. I think she would have been pleased. The pianist, Kaye Davis, opened the memorial with “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” At a family funeral in the ‘80s, Mom told me that she would like that played at her funeral. I’m glad I remembered. Herb Thomas officiated, of course. Rick introduced a video tribute he had prepared. He set it to the song “I Can See Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash (“I can see clearly now, the rain has gone …”) which had special significance for Mother after she lost an eye to cancer forty years ago. She had told Rick back then that the song made her kind of sad, but also kind of happy. It was a triumphant video; Mother was smiling and laughing in almost every shot. One of Mother’s neighbors, who had not known about the cancer and the loss of the eye, commented that, “She never let her cancer define her.” Mother would have liked that. She outlived her cancer by forty years.

After the video, Kaye played an arrangement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” with the hymn, “It Is Well with My Soul” that Mother had been moved by in a concert Kaye had given several years ago. Brother Herb gave a personal, moving, and comforting eulogy and, after the benediction, an old arrangement of a gospel song, “Going Home” by the Johnson Brothers, was played to end the service. Mother had that song played at Dad’s funeral and told me that she and Dad had agreed that they would play it at each other’s memorials.

My brother, nephew, and I were among the pallbearers and I did flash back to that sunny afternoon when Mom walked across the grounds to show me where she would be buried. Brother Herb recited scripture, prayed, and those gathered sang the “Doxology.” We did our best. I hope she would have been pleased.

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When Mother chose the monument for their graves in 2016, she asked that two intertwined wedding bands and the words “Together Forever” be engraved under the family name. And now her remains are back with Dad’s for eternity. During Mother’s most intense period of grieving after Dad passed away, I suggested that – as a distraction – she might sit down and write the story of her life and see what good memories that exercise might elicit. I found it in her papers the other day; it begins with the day she met Dad.

There’s really no way to talk about Jean Journey without talking about Grover. They supported each other and never tired of doing things together. When Dad died, I wrote that “they were a formidable team for over 63 years. They were independent and occasionally stubborn. As a team, they didn’t always agree; Mother was never the kind of wife who felt bound to abide by her husband’s opinions and Dad always respected and valued that in her. He didn’t try to run her life and she didn’t try to run his.” However, she always helped and supported him in his work and he always helped and supported her in hers.

Early in their marriage, they lived in Chicago while Dad was stationed at 5^th Army Headquarters. Mother worked for an insurance company. When Mother got pregnant with me, they both turned down promotions at their respective jobs to request a transfer south to be closer to family for the arrival of their first-born. Mom always talked about their time in Chicago. They were just kids and the place seemed to be an adventure for them. In their photos from that time – at museums, in Grant Park, along Lake Michigan – they look so happy. Mother always wondered what their lives would have been like if they had settled in Chicago.

The marriage took them to many places as Dad worked with a national company that transferred with every promotion, but they always seemed to land back in Alabama. Wherever they went, they involved themselves with volunteer opportunities in church or schools or other community projects. They were never busier, however, than they were when Dad took a job in Tuscaloosa and eventually became an administrator at the University of Alabama, where he would stay until he retired.

In Tuscaloosa, Mother had opportunities to work with children. She was never happier than when she was holding a baby or talking to a child – hers or anybody else’s. Her favorite charities were those that served children. She especially liked supporting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and Ronald McDonald House at Children’s of Alabama. She and Dad taught four and five-year-olds in Sunday School for years and stayed in touch with many of them as they grew up.

Their work in the PTAs of Tuscaloosa City Schools seemed to become legendary for a time. When Dad became president of the City Council of PTAs, Mom was active on a daily basis, visiting the schools, finding out the teachers’, principals’, and students’ needs, and getting it done. I was grown and living out-of-state during much of that time, but whenever I would visit my parents in Tuscaloosa they had school and church projects in the works and were busy fielding phone calls from people soliciting their assistance for other projects. In those days, Mother’s energy seemed boundless.

Mother and Dad were partners in every aspect of their lives. Whenever health issues arose, they became tireless advocates for each other. When Mother lost her eye in the ‘80s, Dad brought her back. Knowing her affinity for gardening, he brought a truckload of dirt to the house, dumped it next to the drive, and she used gardening as a therapy tool. Knowing her fear of driving with only one eye, he stopped on the side of a road and told her to drive the rest of the way home. From that point on, she loved to go for drives by herself until her health began to preclude it. Late in Dad’s life, when he became ill and disabled, Mother challenged his doctors to do more and was determined to bring him home again. When she couldn’t, something in her seemed to break. Over those ten years, I watched her steady decline.

Mother always longed for grandchildren. I didn’t provide her with any but when Rick and Jennifer’s son, Truman, was on the way, Mom’s friends in Tuscaloosa were so excited that Jean was finally having a grandbaby that the people at their church threw a baby shower for her and Dad. Truman’s birth gave both of my parents a fresh spark of energy, it seemed. They cherished their time with him growing up and I always hoped that my mother would be able to see him grown. She did; Truman graduated from college in May.

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I debate whether or not I should bring up Mother’s political point of view since that topic is so polarizing these days. But as she would often say, “Other people seem to have no problem telling me what they support, so why should I hold back?” She always eschewed political party affiliations and tended to support candidates she felt were honest and compassionate. Growing up, and for most of my life, I perceived my mother as being politically passive. She seldom failed to vote, but she didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. Years ago, when she told me who she was going to vote for in a specific election and I challenged her reasons, she blithely replied, “I don’t know … he just amuses me.”

That blithe spirit changed, however, when the current Resident of the White House came to office in 2017. Mother was appalled by everything he said and did; by his lack of morals, ethics, and dignity; by his cruelty, his sexism, his racism. She was horrified by everything he stood for. She became increasingly vocal about it. She became a bit of a news junkie and would talk back to the television whenever the face of “that thing” appeared. The only relief she took from the troubling events of January 6, 2021, was in the fact that his actions on that day had “finished” him politically. So it was of great concern to her when he was “baaaaack” like some dreaded poltergeist. Mother was a person of strong faith and she was shaken by the support for the Resident from within her faith community. It was a source of despair for her. I often heard her say, “Why can’t they see him for what he is?” I was proud of my mother’s belated political outspokenness. We discussed it often and agreed that the existential threat we’re facing was serious enough that we had to speak up. Once, recently, I suggested that maybe it was time we hit the streets in protest. “I would if I could,” she forcefully pronounced. And I know she meant it.

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A few weeks ago, I tripped over an obstacle in downtown Birmingham and had a fall. Rick had stayed with Mother that day to give me a break. He knew what had happened but had not told Mom. When I finally got back to Mom’s house after a trip to the emergency room, my eyes were swollen, my head was bandaged, and I had a pronounced limp. I walked in and stood next to her bed. She looked up, gave me that look, and said, “What have you done now?”

As I was healing from those injuries, and as my swollen eyes evolved into two impressive shiners, the first thing Mother asked when she called for me every morning was that I show her my face. One morning when I went to her bedside, early in my healing process, she said, “Now let me look.” I leaned down so she could see. She muttered oh my as she evaluated the shiners that were purple and green by then and the bandages covering much of my forehead. “You look awful!” she said. And then, after a moment, she burst into the kind of hearty laughter that I hadn’t heard from her in years. I joined in and we laughed for several minutes. It would almost subside and then it would burst forth again. It was the last time we laughed together.

God, I miss her. She would have scolded me for that previous sentence, telling me not to take His name in vain. I wasn’t.