Thoughts about Mildred Evelyn Mullican

It has been a while since I have written on my blog. So much has happened since the last post in March. It was on March 2 that my mom, Mildred, had a stroke while out shopping with Kathy. She then suffered another stroke in the hospital and spend about three weeks in the hospital followed by about four weeks in skilled nursing and then about two weeks in Heritage Assisted Living. We moved her back to the house we had rented for her in Bethany on May 19. The people at Baptist Village Skilled Nursing and Heritage Assisted Living did everything they could to make my mom feel at home and took such good care of her, but she just wanted to "go home" as she said.

You have to know something about my mom's younger years to understand why the hospital, skilled nursing, and assisted living were so hard for her and why she just hated it. From age 5 until she was 14 my mom lived at the St. Patrick's Indian School in Anadarko, OK. It was a hard time in her life. Her mom died in Phoenix, AZ when she was five and grandpa could not care for all the kids so mom and her brother, Jimmy, came back to Oklahoma to live with their grandmother, but when she died they went to live at the boarding school. All the girls had to dress in drab black dresses and all wore their hair in a short pageboy style which went again Indian custom of the girls having long hair. They were not allowed to speak their native tongue and life was very hard for a little five year old girl. The skilled nursing and the assisted living center seemed like boarding school to her again. Like so many in her generation she was independent, and didn't want help, she wanted to do it herself. She just kept pressuring my brother, Steve, and I to take her "home" so we finally relented and agreed to do so although we knew that it would be hard for all us. She was home for one week when she went "home" very suddently to be with the Lord on Tuesday, May 26 at the age of 86. On Thursday, May 28, I conducted her funeral service at the Dale Cemetery where she is buried next to my daddy who passed away in 1992. She just wanted a simple graveside service, but I think she would have been surprised by the number of people who attended her funeral. She touched a lot of lives. Her funeral service was held on my daddy's birthday, May 28. Someone said my dad got a great birthday present this year when momma joined him in heaven. I have to agree. They were married in Chickasha, OK in 1938 when momma was 15 and daddy was 20 although their marriage license says that she was 18 and he was 21!

Mom had told me numerous times what she wanted for her funeral. She had picked out the clothes she wanted to be buried in and she said she wanted a single red rose on top of a beautiful piece of crochet work she had done just for her casket. The folks at Mercer-Adams Funeral Home in Bethany are some of the most wonderful folks in the world! My friend, Tim Adams, helped my brother and I to select a perfect casket for mom. She looked beautiful and at peace! No more pain! No more bad hip. No more strokes. No more heart disease. No more diabetes.

I preached mom's funeral because I felt that I needed to even though, I must admit, it was difficult at times. God has given me the grace to preach both my mom and dad's funerals. You may wondering about the picture at the top of the blog. It was taken in November of 2002 at the Painted Desert in Arizona. I took mom on a big road trip that year to Phoenix so she could see her mother's grave in Mesa. Her mom's grave had been unmarked since her death in 1928 and mom wanted to place a marker in her memory so we bought a stone marker here and took it to Mesa seeing the Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, and Grand Canyon along the way. The Route 66 car jacket she is wearing in picture is something she made. She was a professional seamstress and dry cleaner. She talked the whole way to Phoenix! The trip to Mesa to see her mom's grave was a part of her life journey that mom had to do! I am so glad I took the time to make that trip because it helped me to understand my mom in a way that I never had before. That's why I needed to share at her service because I felt I needed to share some of this with my family.

I miss her especially at certain times like last week when my second grandson, Grayson Takoda, was born to Tony, my oldest son, and his wife Kim. In the midst of the excitement of the morning when Grayson was born I caught myself thinking, "I need to call mom and tell her about Grayson's birth." She would have loved his Indian middle name, Takoda, which means "friend to all."

One final thing about the picture. It was taken with a small Canon digital camera. There was not special setup. I just saw saw the pose and clicked the picture and it is priceless. I have gotten more compliments from that photograph, but one comment was quite humorous and mom loved it. One person looking at the photo said, "How did you get the old Indian woman to stand there." Well, the answer is pretty obvious isn't it?