Someone suggested I put the newest entry at the top–so, I’m putting the newest entry at the top! How’s that for customer satisfaction.
Two couples on Friday left the clinic after conversing with us, one African-American, the other Hispanic. We spent several hours afterwards making stops and deliveries in Detroit. One of the stops was at Jeter funeral home. Y.’s baby boy, Jeris, was finally taken off the respirator, and died four minutes later. We took the mother to the funeral home Friday and made arrangements for a service and funeral. That funeral I then attended on Monday. The rain fell relentlessly; streets were partially flooded. Yet at the service there was a good showing for this little boy whom most of the mourners never met. He was born in a hospital and lived his whole life in a hospital. As I said at the service, Jeris never won any awards, never earned any salary, never said any wise or memorable words. There was, then, only one reason to give him a funeral service–because he was a child of God.
On Saturday I kept my promise to my daughter and took her to Sleeping Bear Dunes for her 16th birthday. I had arranged to have a substitute–two, in fact–but they arrived 45 minutes late. Poor Alicia, then, faced the morning rush by herself. She also made the day’s visits by herself. She took a check to one mom to help her pay rent. She visited another mom whom she helped to buy a birthday cake for her daughter. For the past week there’s been only two of us. This week there’s just me, because Alicia and her family also went up to Sleeping Bear Dunes. Moral of the story: we need help, people who are willing to drive into Detroit, to visit one or two of these moms.
