Beauty for Ashes

It was Sunday evening, December 22, 2013. We sat in the warm and cheerful living room at our Pastor’s house, enjoying the soft Christmas music and glittery holiday decorations. The room was filled with chatter and laughter. As we sank down into a velvety, plush couch, I began talking to my friend Darralyn Delaughter who, more often, simply goes by “D.” Her graying blonde curls and sparkly brown eyes sit above lips always ready to curve into a warm smile. She sports a pair of snowflake earrings I suspect she made herself. D has a crafty knack for creating beautiful pieces of jewelry.

She began telling me about being raised in Arizona.

“Yuma, Arizona is the town that I grew up in. It was 20 miles above the Mexican border.” D explained to me, Yuma is set on a raised “table” of land called a mesa. Marvelous purple mountains surround the mesa, some 20 to 30 miles in the distance.

“It’s just beautiful. And the Gila river comes down through Yuma, by Yuma, and, um, it’s a good way to cool off!” The Gila river, I learned, ran along the edge of Yuma and was, I inferred, a popular place to play in the hot summer months.

D continued, “They had several parks that we’d go picnic at when I was a kid. And the one, there was one, my favorite one was the Yuma Territory Prison Park.” The park, D told me, was by the Gila River and was “a big, long park with different things to play on.” D appreciated the pretty green grass in that park. Extra effort, she said, was exerted to keep that grass green out in the arid desert climate.

The Yuma Territorial Prison has a museum, with a prisoner graveyard nearby. “We didn’t ever go too much into the museum… but, um, they had a graveyard and it was up on a little mounded hill – a natural hill, but that’s where they would bury the prisoners… and we used to go play tag up there,” she chuckled.

“So you would hide behind the headstones?” I asked, amused and intrigued.

No, she corrected me, there were no headstones; “There were just mounds. And… didn’t have any names on them; no crosses or nothin’.. And we’d go play tag and run around and laugh and giggle on those graves! And.. I loved to go up there. Used to go there a lot.”

Her mother lived in Yuma until she died last year. D has one older and one younger brother. She told me a little about her family.

“My two brothers are still there. I think my younger brother is still there; we don’t know where he is; he’s kind of disappeared on us.” After a pause, she went on to describe her older brother. Carefully choosing her words, D described him as “hateful.” And she didn’t say “hateful” in a… hateful… tone but, rather, with a gentle timbre of sadness and a touch of hurt, the end of her word rising as if followed by a question mark. In a calm, matter-of-fact tone tinged with sadness, she went on to tell me, “He’s run off his wife and he’s run off the rest of the family.”

“So… um… I… have been disappointed in them,” D went on to divulge to me, “because they never have called me to tell… to talk to me about Mama dying.”

Neither of her brother nor anyone in her family has yet to tell her about her mother’s passing. “So…. I haven’t talked to them at all.”

All I could say was, “Wow.”

D is still close to her brother’s ex-wife, whom she refers to as her sister. Stumbling over her words, she explained, “And my, uh, his ex-wife… his ex-wife was the one the called me to tell me that she had passed. She died of pneumonia. And, um, she was 90. Yeah, she was 90.”

Because of a medical condition at the time, D was not able to travel to Yuma to attend memorial services for her mother.

“I couldn’t go. And, um, they said she looked really pretty; they really did her up nicely. And she wanted to be buried and… my brother made the decision to cremate her. And then he wanted to sprinkle her ashes on her mother’s grave. And I didn’t like that idea but I didn’t have any input. And I don’t think they’ve ever sprinkled the ashes anywhere; I don’t know where the ashes are.”

Ashes. “She didn’t want ashes,” I thought silently. Looking up, I asked D, “So you don’t have any kind of place to visit her?”

“Well I…” she patted her heart and beamed. "I got her!”

Understanding instantly, I nodded and smiled back. Many of us can relate to stories like this… of hurt and loss, of being treated unfairly or being left out, or of feeling… forgotten.

Many of us have come to realize that, like D, our “families” can be made up not only of people related to us genetically, but of people we CHOOSE as family. Because they are kind. Because they love us. Because they accept us, unconditionally. Those qualities, to me, form the base definition of what a true FAMILY is.

Perhaps it is through her own life experiences that D has become such a caring person. I have observed her over and over… giving people a ride, helping people move, inviting people to social activities so they won’t feel lonely. At church, D is quick to spot a newcomer and introduce herself and even sit beside them in the service to help them feel welcomed and comfortable,

Perhaps some people who have experienced the lack of a family, or a family that has fallen apart… know best how to fill in that same kind of gap for other people. A woman with a heart that is humble yet strong, I think D “got” it, when she heard Jesus say through His word, “Love one another.”

Arizona is where a big piece of D’s heart will always be. “I want to go back,” she said, “My niece, in Prescott Valley, is pregnant. They’re due in the end of March, I think. She’s had a couple of baby showers; I’ve seen some neat pictures. And I told her I’d come after she was born.”

"To all who mourn in Israel, he will give a crown of beauty for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness, they will be like great oaks that the LORD has planted for his own glory." - Isaiah 61:3