Losing Your Biggest Fan

A year ago today, my mom died.

On the morning of December 2, 2020 my mom, Sharese Lenise Tisby, died. My dad was holding her hand when it happened. She was asleep in the comfort and safety of her own home.

We all have to face death. Few get the opportunity to do so as gracefully as my mother. 

Alzheimer’s is a thief. It stole my mother from us in increments of lost memories and missing moments. Although she was present physically, we witnessed the fading of the bright personality we all knew.

I get my silliness, and my dance moves, from my mom. She choreographed this dance for some school or church event and got her friends to join in.

Of course, we still loved her and I knew, deep down, that she was still with us despite the cognitive carnage of the disease. But we’ve been grieving in waves for the past five or six years since her diagnosis. 

Her death came as a kind of mercy.

Now finally she is fully herself. She remembers us all better than we now remember her. One day we will share those remembrances again together.

But there is still the grief. The loss. The ache. The emptiness.

With her absence, I am learning to cherish my dad even more. I’m so thankful for his example. As a husband he made good on his wedding vows, “in sickness and in health.” He made my mom his priority and did his best to ensure her comfort.

He’s done the same as a parent to me and my siblings. He was always there to give me a ride, go to my boxing matches, or when I grew up, to have a rum and Coke while watching football.

But on the one year anniversary of her death, I’m thinking about my mom.

An old friend with whom I was very close in high school but hadn’t talked to in years messaged me on Facebook when she heard the news. She had known my mom, and sent her kindest condolences. 

In that message she wrote,

“Losing your mom is like losing your biggest fan. I know she was more to you than that, but I'm sure she was and still is so proud of you.” 

Those words, like my mom’s death, came as a painful mercy.

Until that point, I couldn’t name my sorrow. Beyond the general feeling of the loss of someone close to  you, there is something distinct and particular about your mother dying. Now, at last, I could put that peculiar loss into words.

With my mom’s death, I lost my biggest fan. 

I remember being on a family vacation several years ago with my mom and dad, my siblings and their families. We were cooking dinner in the hotel room, and she was sitting at the dinner table alone while everyone else stood around the kitchen counter talking and laughing.

It was relatively early in her illness, but even at this point she couldn’t hold onto the thread of a conversation, so sometimes she preferred just to sit and listen.

But I had moved away from home at 18-years old and hadn’t moved anywhere close since. This was one of the few times I got to see and talk to her.

I sat next to her and just started talking. I knew she wouldn’t be able to respond very well, but I had the inkling that she could understand better than she could communicate. So I filled the air between us with words. I think I was telling her about grad school and my dismay about still not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up. Some handwringing subject like that.

In one of her last lucid moments she had something to say to me. 

“I’m proud of you.” 

Polio in her childhood had caused some nerve damage on one side of her face, so every time she smiled it was charmingly crooked. An easy-going grin with a glint of mischief in her eyes. Quintessential Sharese Tisby. She flashed that smile as she expressed her confidence in me. 

At one of the grandbabies’ birthdays

My memory is not that good, (a fact that frequently gives me pause as I contemplate the possibility that I, too, may develop Alzheimer’s) so I can’t recall if she actually said “I’m proud of you” or “I love you.” 

But coming from a mom, is there really much difference?

“I love you” means “I’m proud of you.”

“I’m proud of  you” means “I love you.” 

In the year since she died, plenty of people have complimented me for what I’ve accomplished. They share, even though it’s still hard for me to receive, how much they appreciate my work, my words, my leadership, and such. 

But my mom was proud of me before there was ever really anything to be proud of. She believed in me before I had achieved anything. 

Her joy in me came not from what I did, but from simply existing, from being in the world, from being her son.

With the perspective of decades of life, I now realize that I should have believed in myself at least as much as my mom did. 

I still struggle with that.

My mom was a true church lady—a church mother. (New Light Missionary Baptist Church0

Even as a person who has accomplished much in a relatively short career—New York Times bestselling book, a PhD, a beautiful family—I still can’t convince myself on most days that everything good in my life isn’t just a case of sporadic good luck.

It’s no one’s obligation to make us believe in ourselves, but the people who love us most somehow find a way to help us grasp the power and potential we contain within.

That’s what I miss most about my mom—her steady, confident, defiant belief in who I am and what I can accomplish.

I wish I could go back to my mom right now, and show her all the things I’m doing and dream of doing so she could see the results of her pride in me.

I wish I could tell her about my second book, How to Fight Racism, and my third, a young reader’s version, coming out in a month. I wish she could see my son and gush about how cute he is and how fast he’s growing up. I wish I could treat her and my dad to a vacation anywhere they want to go because as I grow older I want to do everything I can to thank them for loving me into adulthood.

I wish I could see that crooked smile again, and hear my mother once again say those words to me, “I’m proud of you.” 

I’m not looking for a flood of strangers and acquaintances to affirm me. On most days, I’m not lacking in determination. My goals actually get grander each year. Plus, I have no shortage of people who affirm my work and my being.

It’s just that no one else is my mom.

My mom made me feel like I could soar. I really did have a sense that anything was possible knowing that in my mountaintop moments and in the valley of despair, she would always be my biggest supporter. 

Losing my mom was like losing my biggest fan.

You can honor Sharese Tisby by making a donation to the Alzheimer’s Association and click the box that says, “Yes, this is an honor or memorial gift.”