FOUND

FOUND

Medgar Fallon Roe

The newspapers’ police report said she was found, curled around a dirty blanket under an overpass.  The coroner eventually estimated her age as being between 75 and 80.

She was another homeless woman, aged and unhealthy, living on the streets, seeking sustenance from whatever source presented itself.

While alive I imagined most passersby had turned away in disgust; Youths most probably would have hurled insults at her.

I speculated: a few newspaper readers might conjure brief thoughts of sadness on this woman’s behalf.  But … who had she been all those years prior to her discovery beneath that non-descript underpass?

--=< * >=-

She had abandoned her dreams at an early age, and elected to follow the dreams of the man she thought of as her ‘Star’, to be her champion and life long companion.  More than once she had uprooted her life and accompanied him in pursuit of some impassioned dream he envisioned … and had done her best to help him find it.

The “star” on which she had hung her hopes and her entire future abandoned her, with their child, in a bus station in Valdosta, Georgia.  She was 28 at the time.

Obviously, the wear of the subsequent years and hardships had taken their toll on her, both mentally and physically.  The times and opportunities had passed in which she could have engaged in furthering her education, as it was those things she had put aside to follow “his” dreams.

It was not she who failed, but rather, the “star” she had believed in.  The looking glass of hope and aspiration she had longingly gazed into when she was fifteen, he had shattered.  A lifetime was lost, and its’ shell she wore as remnant slivers of tattered hopes and desires.

She was driven to those things she had to do to survive, and her child, taken from her, was somewhere in the morass of government bureaucracy, assuring she’d never see him again.

I imagined there had been days of solitude when white tracks on her soiled face would be seen from her eyes to her chin, as the legacy of her memories.

Her days were filled with foraging.  Her eyes had been dulled, the brightness they once held scrubbed away by disappointment and defeat.  Her body became permanently dirty and scarred.  Hope to her remained only as a vague memory of a word of no substance or possibility. She was completely voided of any expectations and lived from day to day driven only by the most basic of instincts … it’s what’s left when a Life is callously destroyed.

I was too late, but, today, at last I had found my Mom.