’m originally from West Virginia. My sisters all moved down to Ohio for work and they just stayed there. I didn’t go because I couldn’t leave my momma. See, she had her legs took off from diabetes. It’s called sugar diabetes. It’s like a blood disorder that gets in your bones, and if you hurt yourself a very little bit, like a little cut or something, it won’t heal. It’ll turn black and rot. My mom hurt her feet, and they had to take both of them off up to her knees. How she hurt them was, she burned one of them. She was burning some fire outside—some trash—and a hairspray can blew up and come back and hit her foot. And it never would heal. She took care of it, but the diabetes was so high in her bloodstream that it wouldn’t heal. It just turned black and they had to take it off. And her other one, she dropped a can of corn on top of it and cut it, and it wouldn’t heal, so she lost the other one. She lost the one in 1969 or ’70 and the other one was in the 80s. She was in a wheelchair for 20-some years.
My oldest brother now—he’s the pastor of my church—he’s diabetic and he has the awfulest legs you ever saw. He won’t let anyone take them off, either. He’s got big old sores. They’re all swelled up and black-looking. Have you ever seen a cut scab over? That’s what the big old sores on his legs look like. And they’re all black. He can walk, but eventually they’ll rot. Then he’ll have to have them took off—he won’t have no choice. Longer he waits, the more and more of them he’ll have to get taken off. See, what diabetes does, it eats right down to the bone. It’s like a virus. It eats right down to the bone and it’ll eat through the flesh and everything. It’s not a nice thing to have.
Mom and Dad’s both dead. Dad died 23 years ago and my mom’s been dead eight years. My sister-in-law and me took care of my mom. My sister-in-law lived with her, and I lived over here. I’d work every day, go over and sit with her every night, and then work the next day. I was over there with her every night. That gave my sister-in-law a breather, because she had three little small children. I’d sleep there, if you could call it sleep. I’d sleep at the foot of her bed on a cot. You’d go to sleep and then she’d holler out for you and wake you up. She’d wake up every night. My mom had—I don’t know if you’d call it Alzheimer’s or what—but something like it. When she woke up, she’d need to go to the bathroom. We had a potty in the room with her, a potty chair, and we’d take her to the bathroom and I’d sit and read to her a while. She couldn’t see due to the diabetes. I’d have to read to her. The Bible or the newspaper.
A week before my mother died, when she knew she was dying, she called all of the family together. Well, none of them showed up but me and my baby brother and my baby sister. The rest of them had their own lives. They didn’t want to be fooled with, if you know what I mean. She told me what she wanted for her funeral. She wanted a pink dress with just a little touch of lace around the collar and a little lace around the sleeves. And she didn’t want nothing big and fancy, she just wanted a white coffin with gold trim. She told me what music she wanted—“Amazing Grace” and “Momma’s Hands.” She told me everything right down to the preacher that she wanted. And she told the preacher, “I want you to chastise them,” meaning her kids who wasn’t there to see her before she died. You know what chastising means, right? It means, “Put them down. Run them through the coals, make them feel guilty for what they done.” And he did. The preacher did. He made them feel guilty for what they’d done to her. He ran them through the mill. He said, “She called you, she knew that she was dying, she wanted to see you, and you fellas wouldn’t show up.” He got right up in the church house and told it the day they was burying her.
They just stood there and looked at him. After the service was over, they didn’t even walk up to the coffin and look at her. They just went out the back door. The good Lord’ll deal with them for it. I don’t have to say a thing or do a thing. My dad used to say, “Don’t say nothing or do nothing that you have to say the word ‘sorry’ for, because the word ‘sorry’ is not in the Bible. It’s not in the Bible nowhere.”
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