By Lee A. Daniels

I was in Houston attending a conference in late July of 1999, when my sister Lois called to tell me our mother was dying.

I wasn’t surprised. I knew that was what my mother had planned. Six years earlier I had, literally, seen it in her face.

By the spring of 1999 we-my mother’s four children and six grandchildren-knew that Mom was dying. Since the first of the year she had gotten visibly smaller, more fragile and stooped; she was literally bending toward the earth. There was no tragedy in this; no catastrophic, wasting illness had weakened her physically or mentally. In one sense, my mother’s dying was the natural progression of her eighty-four-years-long life. But I alone knew then with certainty that Virginia Naomi Harris Daniels was willing herself to die. She was willing herself to die because she didn’t want to live beyond the twentieth century without the love of her life-my father, Lloyd Abbott Daniels, Sr.

One could say there was an apparent irony at work here. My mother and father had separated in 1958, and never lived together again. Dad continued to live in Chicago, a city he loved, where he was a longshoreman and a fervent union man. Mom took my brother and I, then 11 and 10, and moved back to Boston, where she had been raised and where she and Dad had met and married in the 1930s. By the mid-1960s they had reconciled; but also by then the new pattern of the rest of their lives, and of the Daniels family as a whole, was set. Two or three or four times a year Dad, who hated Boston, would come to visit for no more than five days. Mom never set foot in Chicago again; indeed, I don’t think she ever left Boston itself again.

Lee Daniels and Mother

But the irony was only apparent, not real. At the end of their lives, my parents were as much in love with each other as they had been when they were courting and first married. The depth of their love for each other was largely hidden from us children, because neither my father nor my mother were outwardly demonstrative people. But I had seen how deep it was six years earlier, the July night in 1993, when I went to tell Mom that Dad had died.

I was living in Boston then; so, when Lois called, it was left to me to tell Mom. I called her: “Mom, it’s me. I’m coming to see you. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

She would see through my cryptic words immediately, I was sure as I hung up. We had all known for a year that the cancer Dad had been fighting for ten years had spread. He himself had told us he wasn’t going to beat it this time; and all of us-except Mom-had, in the previous months, made our pilgrimages to Chicago to spend a few last days with him. He was a strong, working man to nearly the end, collapsing and falling into a coma only that month. Then, Lois and my other sister, Leslie, took turns sitting by his beside at the hospice until the end.

When I got to Mom’s apartment, I waited for her to sit down, then said, “Mom, Dad died tonight.”

Sitting across from her, I saw this look of wistfulness come across her face. “Oh,” she said. “I never expected your father to die before me. I never expected it.”

I was stunned, and I started to say, “Mom, how can you say that? We’ve all known for a year ….”

And then I realized Mom had not stopped talking, that she had retreated into a reverie, back to the early 1930s, when she and Dad were courting. “Oh, your father was so handsome, and such a fine speaker. I loved him so. ….. I’ve loved him all these years. Do you know we talk on the phone even now two and three times a day?”

As she said these words, my mother’s face became transformed. The weariness and the lines and creases of age fell away and her skin became as smooth and vibrant as in the picture I have of her at 19, just after she and Dad were married.

I have no memory of what I said to her in response. I know I sat with her for awhile, my arm around her shoulders, aware and grateful that I had been allowed to glimpse my parents’ grand love affair. Her reverie, I felt, was a gift to me-a gift with a kaleidoscope of images of her and my father and messages about the fullness of their lives and the endurance of their love.

I felt my love for my mother change after that. I had always loved her and admired her; I had always felt she was a woman of towering strength, someone possessed of significant intellectual and artistic gifts that she had long ago realized could not flower in the racially-restrictive America of the mid-twentieth century. She had put her own dreams aside. But, being clairvoyant, she was determined that her children would be ready to take advantage of the opportunities the future was going to make available to black Americans.

Now, I felt a deeper appreciation of her. I had seen a person who had kept the flame of love and devotion to another gloriously alive through all the vicissitudes of their lives. Its intensity had never weakened. I also knew that night that my mother would not want to live into the new century without Dad. They had lived and loved in one century. They were both going to die in that one century.

I didn’t get from Houston to Boston in time to be at my mother’s bedside when she died. When my plane from Houston landed at Boston’s Logan Airport, I ran to the phone and called the hospital. Lois told me that Mom had died a half hour earlier. But the previous night, when Lois had called me in Houston from Mom’s hospital room, Mom had apparently gestured for the phone, even though she wasn’t supposed to exert herself by speaking. “Mom,” I said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” trying to pack into the words the emotion that I was speeding to her side.

“That’s alright, son. That’s alright. Everything is alright.”

Just those words. And yet, it seemed to me I could see my mother smiling. I could feel her happiness, and I felt that she was sending me at that moment right through the telephone wire, a small gift box, silver in color, tied with a silver ribbon. I saw myself taking the box in my hands and opening it, and seeing that at first glance there was nothing in it, but then realizing in the space of that box was the full measure of two wonderful lives lived.

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.