Rhoda Jean

I stood there completely covered from head to toe in personal protection gear to safeguard against the contamination of an unseen enemy. It looked and felt like a space suit of sorts. I wept with sobs of grief as I stared at the comatose body of my oldest sister as she lay hopelessly in an intensive care unit hospital bed. It was about seven o'clock in the evening. The room was cold and dimly lit. Tears mercifully clouded my vision as I stood over Rhoda, saying her first and middle name over and over…”Rhoda Jean, Rhoda Jean”. That was the way our late father had called out to her, always using the first and middle name. Our father had died over thirty eight years ago, and our mom had passed away when I was eight years old over fifty three years ago. At that moment, weeping with hunching shoulders of reflexes of hyperventilation, I thought of all the ways my seventy-three year “big” sister had become my surrogate mom. “Rhoda Jean, Rhoda Jean”, I sobbed, stirring memories of growing up, little brother facing fatal moments of finality. 

The attending physician had counseled me that now was the time to come and say goodbye. I had four other living siblings, all sisters. Three were older than me and one was younger. Our family dynamics had settled upon me, the brother and family pastor, to serve as the point of contact and decision maker as Rhoda’s physical condition rapidly deteriorated. I had taken her to the hospital emergency room eight days earlier. Rhoda was short of breath, but as a lifelong asthmatic, that was not unusual. Rhoda lived with it, and we were familiar with the routine. Once a year, or often every other year or so, Rhoda’s condition required a brief hospitalization to receive emergency steroid treatments to bring an unarrested asthma attack under control. 

After I had finished teaching a Wednesday midweek Bible class at the church, I went to the multi unit building my older sisters shared to take Rhoda to the emergency room as I had promised. I rang the bell, entered the building, walked into Rhoda’s first floor apartment and found her ready to go. She walked slow, slower than at other times. “I just feel so tired,” she said as we painstakingly made our way down a short flight of stairs and out back to my black SUV truck. With one other sister riding with us, at about nine o'clock that evening we made a twenty minute drive to Loyola Medical Center, Rhoda’s preferred hospital. It was March 25, 2020. We had been hearing of a globally surging viral infection called “Covid 19”. The hospital had recently established protocols that prohibited non-patient visitors from entering the building, and that included the emergency room waiting area. I was limited to wheeling Rhonda up a ramp and transferring that duty to hospital staff at the emergency room door. “Me and Jennie will wait in the car until they call for us.” “Ok, Marshall”, Rhoda replied, wheezing. “Love you, big sis!”, I said.

After two hours or so, I got the call on my mobile phone, and I was directed to come inside to be briefed in the vestibule of the waiting room near the security station. Rhoda was to be admitted. We could call her attending nurse and have an opportunity to speak with a doctor after she was settled into a room in the morning or afternoon. I returned to my car, and drove away to drop Jeannie back off at the building and headed home around midnight. 

Exactly eight days later, the next time I saw Rhoda she had been intubated. That is, she had a ventilator tube down her throat to help her breathe. The first night or two of her hospitalization, I had scheduled nightly over the phone briefings with her attending nurse about her condition. The exchanges with the professionals focused on oxidation levels in Rhoda’s extremities. I think I followed the dialogue, at least more or less. By the third night, I asked to speak with Rhoda. She was to be transferred to a “Covid” floor, as she had tested positive for the mysterious virus of an emerging pandemic. The conversation with Rhoda was short and her breathing was labored. “I love you, big sis”. “Love you too brother”. That was our sibling love language. And though things were clearly serious, there was nothing about the prognosis or our exchange that seemed final. But, as day four rolled around, the nightly reports seemed more an ambiguous recital of fluctuating oxidation levels and numbers. Rhoda was sleeping, unavailable, and the attending physician’s reports shifted from encouraged to discouraged. I became more confused and concerned. I translated the details of oxidation levels and hopefulness as best I could to our siblings and Rhoda’s son. Finally, around the same day, my duties as decision maker found me agreeing to “intubation”, without which the doctor feared Rhoda’s lungs would “tire out”, or she could suffer cardiac arrest, or both. Clearly, this was much more than the usual treatments for asthma that we had signed up for a week ago in the emergency room vestibule. By the end of the seventh day, the physician was very pessimistic about the prospects and outcome for my sister. In the event of cardiac arrest, resuscitation attempts would almost cruelly prolong the inevitable. It was, if I desired, time to come to the hospital with her son, Joel, and say goodbye.

“Rhoda Jean, Rhoda Jean”, I stood there and sobbed. That’s what daddy had called her. She had been the eldest child of our father the Baptist preacher. From age sixteen to age forty-four she had played the organ at the church he had pastored for forty-one years. After daddy passed, and I became a minister and pastor of another church at age twenty six, Rhoda played for me. At age seventy three, she had been semi retired from organ playing in recent years, performing mostly for day time funerals when younger musicians were hard to find. The days when we had to conduct day services we used those occasions as our sort of “me” time together. We would leave the graveside burial and have a late breakfast or early lunch. I made sure that the SUV truck I had bought was large enough for my oldest big sister to get in and out of comfortably. We shared meals and talked politics and racial issues and family history, and memories of mamma and daddy. 

As the eldest child of a pastor’s household, she had been the rebellious trailblazer of our family lore. She was the first to wear an Afro haircut. Daddy complained to his oldest sister that “Rhoda Jean done cut her hair like a boy!” The first to graduate college, she became a Chicago Public School teacher and was the first to move out of our family’s public housing apartment. She was the first to travel to Africa on a post graduate trip and the first to wear Afrocentric dashikis to church. Before going to Africa, Rhoda had had a mild stroke that slightly twisted her mouth. But she traveled anyway, even as daddy mumble to her sisters, “that girl should stay home”. She was the first to have child out of wedlock who refused the obligatory apology to “beg pardon” before the congregation before the reinstatement to church membership. Daddy held his tongue and kept his composure. The church organist gift is so necessary that the public repentance for reinstatement apparently became unnecessary for Rhoda Jean. She played the organ during and after her pregnancy, and in so doing transformed our congregational culture, making it more fair and gracious, asserting her preacher’s kid prerogatives. I thought about that and smiled to myself as I stood at her bedside. “Rhoda Jean, Rhoda Jean”, I murmured again, looking at my sister, her mouth gaped open with tubing, her chest inhaling and exhaling aided by the ventilator. 

Rhoda had the one birth son, Wesley, and son she adopted at fifteen months old, Joel. She had Wesley through a relationship she had with Al KIng, a man who had been known to have fathered multiple children with several women. I do remember him before he died some years ago. He was a smooth operator. I always thought he had figured a preacher's daughter with a good job and a nice apartment meant he had come into a situation well suited for his skill set. They lived at her place briefly. It was a short lived affair. After she became pregnant, he disappeared. Rhoda gave birth surrounded by her trusted sisters and named her son after the hospital he was born in. Before Wesley turned ten, the first church I pastored had been involved in a program called “ one church, one child”. It had been determined that there were so many African American children in the foster care system that it constituted a community state of emergency. The program mission was to challenge black churches to seek at least one family in the congregation willing to adopt one child to alleviate the crisis. Rhoda, a single mother and school teacher, heard the presentation, stepped up to the plate and followed through on the process. With Rhoda leading the way, she adopted, and our family embraced, baby Joel. She said at the time, “I did it because I had a lot of love to give”. Wesley was ecstatic. He had a little brother! 

At the age of nineteen , Wesley had joined the military, mainly to help his mom by setting himself up for education benefits after a term of service. As the son of a single mother, he always sought to make her burden lighter. That was the season of America’s first Persian Gulf War. As the rhetoric of war heated up, Rhoda was incensed by the prospect of the United States government sending an army disproportionately black and brown and poor “to fight for oil”. She felt somewhat guilty too for encouraging Wesley to join the army to steer him into a manhood she could not offer. She organized parents and families across Chicago’s black communities and became a vocal leader in the anti-war movement locally and nationally. Her full page protest picture at a national demonstration in Washington DC was featured in People’s Magazine. As it turned out, the war was short lived with few American casualties. Wesley returned to the states in the winter of 1992. For his last four months of his tour of duty he was stationed in Killeen, Texas. 

I vividly remember Mother’s Day Sunday of 1992. That Sunday I stood before about twenty five people in my small church and taught a Sunday School lesson about suffering….and overcoming. Later that morning, I preached a traditional Mothers Day sermon and Rhoda played the organ and directed the choir music. We concluded our morning services. We had planned a gathering of my siblings and our families at our family home on west Huron street. Before Rhoda’s and I left, the church phone rang with a family emergency. My task was to drive Rhoda to the family home. She was not to drive herself. Two soldiers had met our sisters at the family home when they drove up Huron street after church. “Don’t worry”, I told Rhoda. “We can’t worry about something and we do not yet know what it is”. “It’s not good, Marshall.” “If it was not bad news, it would be delivered by phone, not in person”, Rhoda responded, sitting in the passenger seat looking straight ahead with a blank stare. I did not respond to that. It was silence the rest of the way.

We pulled up on Huron street and got out of the car. Slowly walking up the wooden steps of the mint green and gray five bedroom family home that our dad had purchased for our family six years before he died. It was a grand old house with a small chandler in the foyer. We crossed the threshold. We could hear muted sobs from corners of the living room and adjacent dining room. Graduation pictures and photos of the living and dead sat on the family piano of the living room. The dark green drapes had been drawn closed. One of the soldiers stepped out a shadow in the living room and said to Rhoda, “Are you the mom?” “Ma’am, I’m sorry”. Wesley had been killed off base by civilians in an apparent attempt to rob him and some of his young soldier friends. It had happened very early that Mother’s Day Sunday morning. Rhoda collapsed in my arms. It was surreal. Over time we would process the irony. Her son Wesley had just survived military conflict in the Persian Gulf, only to come back home to the United States and become a fatal victim of violence five months before his twenty-first birthday. I held her in my arms, not knowing exactly what to say. I remembered my lesson from the Bible earlier that morning at church. As my big sister sobbed on my shoulder, I just repeated, “Rhoda Jean, Rhoda Jean”. 

All of these things flooded my thoughts as I stood dressed in my medical space suit at Rhoda’s bedside in the Covid floor of Loyola hospital on April 2, 2020. It was as if Rhoda was still there but not here any longer. A couple of times, I might have said, “can you hear me, Rhoda?” I doubted that she could. The machines made noises that pierced the silence. This looked and felt like a final goodbye. Only the goodbye was not just to Rhoda, but it was also goodbye to a link to parents I had only known in my youth. I don’t know that I felt that I was really talking to her. I probably knew that was futile. It felt as though I had taken the place of my father for Rhoda. I said her name the way he would have said it. It would be as if she was not abandoned as she slipped from us, as this cruel virus mercilessly impaired her airways. If she had any ability to hear me, she would recognize and be comforted by the familiar rhythm of the way daddy used to say her name, “Rhoda Jean, Rhoda Jean.” Joel was there with me. I looked at him and nodded, unable to reach out to each other. The Covid floor had become a dank dungeon of the dying and their untouchables. Joel would need his own time. I left the room. Within thirty six hours, on Saturday April 4th, early in the morning, we got the call. Rhoda expired. 

Covid was cruel to us in so many ways. While we were trying to figure it out, no one knew exactly how to respond to it and treat it, or how to avoid it. It took Rhoda from us. And compounding the grief and the trauma, we as family could not figure out how to put a small funeral service tougher with attendance restrictions. Things got tense. If only twenty-five people can attend the church service, who will it be? How contagious is this virus and will a public service put seniors at risk? Whose children and grandchildren will be included and excluded on what basis? It was a mess. We had family fractures that we had never experienced. As brother and family pastor, I recommended that we not hold a service at the church at all. We settled on a one all day visitation at the funeral home where people could pay respects with staggered attendance. We scheduled a small, brief outdoor burial ceremony the day after that. This would all take place within days, the Friday and next Saturday after Rhoda's death. It all felt necessarily hurried and rushed, as if the arrangements to dispose of remains were all a part of the medical emergency. The burial would be Saturday April, 12th. That too was to be restricted to only ten people. It was a God awful time of life. It was a very bad time to die. Rhoda deserved better, but we did all we knew to do, managing our grief and family dynamics in the midst of an emerging, raging global pandemic. 

Rhoda’s story, her life and death, caught the attention of local and national media. It was as if God had decided to give her a due that we could not. Local news casts covered the circumstances of her death, the grief of our family, and the racial disparities of Covid fatalities. Chicago’s mayor invited me to share our family’s struggles at the city’s Covid press conference. The Tuesday after Rhoda’s death, I received a call from representatives of Oprah Winfrey’s television network. Apparently, Oprah’s team was working feverishly on a special that reported on the ways Covid 19 had disproportionately impacted African American communities. Oprah wanted an interview by the week’s end. The first week in April, our congregation had four Covid related deaths, including Rhoda. My family’s story and the challenges of our community became a central narrative that helped put a human face on the ravages of Covid 19. 

Friday’s visitation saw a steady stream of mourners. I had arranged for an after hours time of grieving, talking my son Marshall Jr. with me after nine o’clock pm. It was therapeutic. I cried like a baby. Saturday morning at ten o’clock am, we were set to bury Rhoda at a sparsely attended graveside ceremony. Most of the family stayed in their cars after our six car caravan arrived. The burial was unceremoniously quick and impersonal. I gave the burial rights in about three and a half minutes. We all waved. With a profound emptiness, I drove away with my son Marshall Jr. seated in the passenger seat in silence. 

That afternoon, about one o’clock pm, Marshall and I were scheduled to be remotely interviewed by Oprah about Rhoda’s story. We headed to the church from the cemetery to prepare for the taping. We set up first in the sanctuary, but the ambient noise would not allow for clean sound. We eventually moved to a small conference room. Oprah apologized profusely, ever so sensitive that we had just buried Rhoda hours before. Oprah has an extraordinary gift of discerning the spirit and connecting emotionally. She did some research and quickly picked up the essence of who Rhoda was in our family dynamic. As the interview progressed, she led a question to my son Marshall Jr. with an air of familiarity, “your dad said his dad called her Rhoda Jean.” Hearing her name again, the way Daddy would say it, stirred up emotion. I tried to control the tears that welled. Rhoda had had no funeral. Her burial was unremarkable. But she had not been forgotten. Her life and the uniqueness of her spirit would be acknowledged and even celebrated by the wider community. She was the best big sister ever. The first child of our daddy the pastor. And Daddy called her “Rhoda Jean”.