While looking for archive favorites, I found this picture of my mother-in-law and felt I wanted to honor her with a post. Her name was Noella, yes, she was a Christmas child. And lived all her life with Jesus in her heart, a heart full of love and kindness.
The picture is from a restaurant on a day we took her for lunch. I forget what the dessert was, but I remember how much she loved it and how happy she was being out with us and Errol's sister and her husband, with whom she lived.
She was a lovely woman. She was born in New Orleans, in a Creole family, in the 1920s. Her life was not easy, but she always felt blessed. She raised nine children, had 23 grandchildren, and by now she would have had many great grandchildren. She suffered a stroke that left her unable to speak for about the last ten years of her life. She never complained.
She knew how to love, to love deeply. Ironically, she suffered from heart failure in the medical sense, but her heart was huge and full of love in the most important sense. You hardly ever found her without a baby on her lap. If there was a baby around, as there always seemed to be, she would hold it and love on it.
And, as the babies grew up, they would remember and love her back, visit her, help her, and so on.
She was a fabulous singer and very beautiful. A recruiter for Duke Ellington's band heard her sing in church and was very interested. She was only 14, so her dad said no way. Of course he did. Instead we got to hear her sing those beautiful old songs from her era.
I met her around the time I lost my own mother. Noella loved me and I loved her back. She's been gone for over ten years now and I miss her so very much. Some people become the glue of a family, as she was, and nothing has been quite the same since she passed.
She knew how to love, to love deeply. Ironically, she suffered from heart failure in the medical sense, but her heart was huge and full of love in the most important sense. You hardly ever found her without a baby on her lap. If there was a baby around, as there always seemed to be, she would hold it and love on it.
And, as the babies grew up, they would remember and love her back, visit her, help her, and so on.
She was a fabulous singer and very beautiful. A recruiter for Duke Ellington's band heard her sing in church and was very interested. She was only 14, so her dad said no way. Of course he did. Instead we got to hear her sing those beautiful old songs from her era.
I met her around the time I lost my own mother. Noella loved me and I loved her back. She's been gone for over ten years now and I miss her so very much. Some people become the glue of a family, as she was, and nothing has been quite the same since she passed.
