Bury My Mother with the Rest of Our Family

Hi Everyone, 

I’m fundraising to give my 92 year old mother a proper burial with the rest of our family, in her hometown of Richmond, Virginia. 

Although I grew up in Pittsburgh, where she moved us to get away from Richmond after My Father died in 1972, when I joined the Army,  Mama went back to her hometown where most of our family lives and it is where she in 1950, became the first person in our family to graduate from college, Virginia Union University, became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Not many Women graduated from college in 1950, fewer Black Women, fewer still in the South, but she did and went on to become a Middle School English Teacher and columnist for the now defunct, Richmond Afro-American, Newspaper, not surprisingly, since her letter to the Editor, the poem, “A Greater Leader is God” to eulogize President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was published when she was 15.

When she lost her senior center apartment in Richmond in 2009, I’ve supported her first in Tacoma, Washington, where I got out of the Army and since 2013 in my hometown of Pittsburgh.

I’m trying to raise the cost to transfer her body and effects, funeral and burial cost, she died today January 24, 2022, almost 50 years after My Father.

“Come let us go back to God”This was always the last song I played for Mama before we said good night. Today I played it she smiled at me at the end and nodded her head then, her heavy breathing stopped, I put my arms around her, her pulse kept getting weaker, she died in my arms.

https://youtu.be/eNAZ_rVDH2A