For My Mother, Gale Louise Beyette, February 15,1938-August 30, 2014

My mom passed away on Saturday, August 30, 2014, at 11:11 am in Vero Beach, Florida.  She was surrounded by people who loved her, and who she loved:  her brother Kent Beyette, her sons Sharlon and Trevon Barnes, me and her other two daughters, Kimberly Adkins and Leyette Johnson, my friend Mimi Eagleton, her daughter-in-law Lisa Thompson Barnes and Lisa’s brother Noel Thompson, and Lisa’s pastor Dr. G.Timothy Womack, who had visited her every day in the hospital.

Her passing was beautiful, peaceful, and profoundly moving. 

Afterwards at Trevon and Lisa’s home, we received many offerings of food from the wonderful folks of Vero, and Mimi painted all of the women with light touches of gold glitter.  I even received a few sparkles on my finger nails.

The next day we went to Lisa’s church, First Presbyterian of Vero Beach, and had a service of celebration of her life.  Her granddaughter Emily brought one of mom’s famed silk flower arrangements to adorn the space.  Jacob Craig, the music minister, opened the service playing the uilleann pipes. We sang “Be Thou My Vision,” “In the Garden” and “How Great Thou Art.” Lisa’s sister-in-law, Robyn Thompson, sang “Near to the Heart of God/Sweet Hour of Prayer.”  Pastor Tim spoke beautifully—“Words of Memory and Hope.” Kent spoke about growing up with mom and watching her evolve from Gail to Gayle to Gale, the spelling of her name she settled on, and which he said was just right—she was a gale force wind.  All who know her know the truth of her name, and Kent described her perfectly. We closed by choosing stones painted with sweet words the night before by Robyn, and building cairns in her memory. 

On September 20, 2014, the entire family and close friends gathered outside of Houston, Texas, at  Klein Memorial Park in Pinehurst, Texas, to bury my mom’s ashes next to her sister Cecile and close to her parents Eloise and Cecil Beyette, under the beautiful, tall pine trees and in the rich red dirt of East Texas.

Trevon, Kent, and I chose the headstone the morning of the service.  Trevon’s idea was to say “A Welcome Wind.” Mine was “In Beauty I Walk.” We combined them, and Kent approved.  The headstone will be a light silvery grey marble, with a delicate frame of flowers, and inside it will say:

           

            A Welcome Wind

            Gale Louise Beyette

            February 15, 1938

                        To

            August 30, 2014

            In Beauty I Walk

Pastor Tim from Vero came to conduct the service, with my father, Reverend Wayne Barnes, assisting.  My stepmother Joyce Barnes came with my dad and beamed comfort and strength to us all. Three couples from First Baptist Church, Zachary, Louisiana, who had known Mom for many years in her role as preacher’s wife, made the 6-8 hour drive to be there:  Charlie and Juanita Massey, James and Pat McLaurin, and Phil and Mary Stagg, who made delicious loaves of chocolate chip banana bread for all of Mom’s children.  Mom’s cousin June and her husband Al Matchett came from Dallas.  Sonja Beyette came with her husband Wayne, from Beyette Road, in Magnolia, Texas—the only Beyette remaining on the family road.  Joan and Kent Beyette, super-troopers who had been there through it all in Vero, kept on trucking, and brought their joyful presence.  Kent’s son Thomas, who I hadn’t seen since he was 4 years old—he’s now 40—brought his solid, impressive self.  Calm and kind David Covington, Mom’s brother-in-law, and his lively daughter and force of nature herself, my cousin Valerie, drove in from Jackson, Mississippi.  All of my wonderful brothers and sisters and their beautiful families came:  Kim, Court, Danielle, Jared, and Angelica Adkins; Sharlon and Liz Barnes, with Sadie Barnes, and grandchildren Ronan, Mackenzie, and Hayden; Trevon and Lisa Barnes—the Rocks through all this—were there despite hospitalizations and pneumonia along the way.  Trevon’s daughter Emily Barnes and her mother April came.  Leyette, John, Aaron, and Kayla Johnson all brought their gifted selves. 

Many of us stayed at a hotel up the road, and the night before, Emily and Angelica gave themselves facials using Mom’s creams, and exclaimed, “Now we smell like Grandma Gale!”  Surely Mom was laughing and enjoying that as much as we were.  Many of us wore jewelry she had given us.

At the service, John led us all in singing “Amazing Grace.”  We sounded astonishingly good.  Leyette told me after that was because he used the right key—that they had practiced various keys in the car until they found the one that everyone could sing.

After the service, Leyette’s friend Mona from college invited us all over to her beautiful home to eat the best barbecue ever and relax and enjoy one another’s company. Here we are:

At the service, we set up a table with the beautiful wooden box from Mom’s home that held her ashes.  It was a box she had carried with her for many years.  It was a rectangular box with angled sides made of a marled reddish oak and had carved silver feet and a curved handle on top with a wreath on the front side.  My sister Kim had found a large wooden gold G in mom’s home and placed it on the table.  We also put this photo of Mom from her youth—red hair and green dress—in all her vibrant beauty and intelligence. 

We closed the service by building cairns with the same stones from the Vero service.  Afterwards we put some stones in the grave and those who wanted also took a stone.

During the service, Pastor Tim and my father spoke beautifully, and then I spoke. Following is more or less what I said.

“I was lucky enough to arrive at the hospital while Mom was still conscious, and I will never forget the way she looked when I first walked in.  She was sitting in her chair with a tray of mostly eaten food, chewing, and looking up with a big smile and laughing at an old classic Cary Grant movie on the TV.  She turned when I entered and said, “I love this old movie,” and then she realized it was me and gave me a melting look of pure love and hugged me.  That first moment, when she was enthusiastically enjoying the movie and her dinner and oblivious to everything else, like she didn’t have a care in the world, that was classic Mom—and the other look was too, in her way. We’ve all seen both of those looks—the totally absorbed in art/movie/story/furniture/curtains/clothes enthusiast and the present and deeply loving mother.

She was an enthusiastic co-creator in life.  Everything she did, she did with enthusiasm.  She knew how to give herself to something.  And she was a very generous person.

When my friend Mimi walked through her home after Mom was gone, even in the amazingly overwhelmed-with-stuff-state it was in, all she could say was, “Your mom was a creative genius.”  She was that.

The Gospel of John says, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions”…well if that’s so, then God just found himself a great interior decorator, and Mom is having a blast.  Because she had more ideas for rooms and homes than this world could hold.  Her last home is testament to that—it was like an artist’s studio, and you could see all the dreams of homes she ever held in it.  And even with all the clutter and disarray, her brilliance was evident.  Now at last she has enough space to create all she envisions, infinite space, an unlimited budget, and the deepest pockets in the universe.

Mom was extraordinarily beautiful and vibrant, and she loved beauty, and she created beauty everywhere she went.  Recently, I heard a minister urge, “Let beauty be our legacy when we leave.”  Beauty—and love—and an abundance of it! is Mom’s legacy to us all.

Until Mom’s passing, I didn’t really understand how much and how pervasively she loved us all and what an amazing accomplishment it was to bring five such different and rich and vital human beings into the world—all between the ages of 20 and 30—in 10 short years, when she was very, very young.  She was an extraordinary mother in those early years, buying all our food on a shoestring budget and cooking all our meals and imagining and creating most of our clothes, all while being a preacher’s wife right across the street from the church, where her life was an open book to all.  As we grew older and our lives developed in unpredictable ways and Mom’s wild and free nature defied conventional paths, my experience of her love became clouded, and I tended to see her as someone to worry about and to protect myself from.  She was a challenging mom, then, and all I could think was “What’s she going to do next?”

But when I saw her in the hospital that day, all I could see and feel was love—her extraordinary, unconditional, generous love for us, and all the richness she had given us—and all was forgiven, and I was no longer worried about Mom or any of us.

Mom used to love to tell the story of when Trevon was a tiny little boy learning to swim in the kiddie pool in Zachary.  It was a shallow pool only a few inches deep, where the parents watched the little ones splash and play in the water.  Trevon ran up to Mom, “Hey, Mom, watch me jump in,” and as he trotted off, she called out after him, “Be sure to hold your breath!”  Urk! He stopped suddenly, looked at the water, turned to her with a puzzled face, and said, “Where’s my breath?”

Mom’s love was like that breath--pervasive, and there just wasn’t one place to hold it.  And now at last I feel it in a way that’s permanent and everlasting—one of the many blessings she has showered us with in the past few weeks in ways I never expected.

Thank you, Mom, for being such a rich and beautiful and generous and fun and loving and intelligent and wise mother.  I am so happy you are my mother.  I will miss you—I already do.  I miss your voice and your sparkling presence.  I miss your insights. Thanks for leaving us so much beautiful stuff—I feel your love and presence in every piece.  I am so grateful.

Mom loved to read, and way back when she taught high school English, I remember she liked to teach Native American writings, and I know she would like this Navajo prayer:

In beauty may I walk

All day long may I walk

Through the returning seasons may I walk

Beautifully will I possess again

Beautifully birds,

Beautifully joyful birds

On the trail marked with pollen may I walk

With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk

With dew about my feet may I walk

With beauty may I walk

With beauty before me may I walk

With beauty behind me may I walk

With beauty above me may I walk

With beauty all around me may I walk

In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk

In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk

It is finished in beauty.

It is finished in beauty.

Her passing was beautiful and peaceful, and it was a profound blessing to be with her and all of you who were present physically or spiritually with your love and support.

She also loved Kahlil Gibran, and for years had his poems on her bedside.  He wrote, “For what is it to die, but to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?  And when the earth has claimed our limbs, then we shall truly dance.”

I know Mom is walking in beauty now, and dancing in the stars. 

One of her favorite songs was “I Wonder as I Wander,” and she used to sing it around home and in church in her strong, clear, beautiful soprano voice:  “I wonder as I wander out under the stars.” 

She is no longer wandering, but I imagine she will be always wondering, and her presence and my memories of her will always fill me with wonder. 

I think of her every time I hear Coldplay sing, 'Cause you’re a sky, you’re a sky full of stars/Such a heavenly view/You’re such a heavenly view.'  

Thanks, Mom, for showing us the way."