BLM Mom Way Ahead of Her Time

[UPDATE: The official cause of my mother's death was "complications due to Covid-19". Please protect the most vulnerable in our population by at least wearing a face mask while in public spaces.]

Mardelle Hudson Westover 1938 to 2020

My mom has passed.

It was a tumultuous last two years of her fighting “the system” the term she used to describe the ten odd nursing homes she lived in during this time. Often lovely facilities she would liken to prisons and as she would later say she “escaped” from like some geriatric Houdini.

But this was to be excepted.

Mardelle was always a rebel, a fighter for the downtrodden and defiant almost literally to her last breath.

She lived her truth. She truly did.

For instance, even as a child, she felt strongly that racism was a disease that had to be eradicated. As a child in the 1940s she angered her teachers by opposing the inequality of the black community. In the 1940s!

As a child.

Wow.

Her BFF, Jackie, (literally they stayed friends to the end) enjoyed recounting the moment when as a teenager in the early 1950s in Santa Monica, California, mom took her new friend, a young black man from South Africa, to church at the very white 5th Church of Christ Scientists one bright sunny afternoon. “Your mom walked with him right down to the front of the church heads turning all the way!”

In the Calvinist-based Christian Science church there are no rituals including baptism. So some Christian Scientists “adopt” honorary god parents. My mom chose a black woman, a daughter of a slave, as her honorary family. We called her momma Broyels. She was a spiritual healer in the Christian Science church and was very effective. Momma Broyels died in the 1970s at nearly 100 years of age.

Mardelle in 1968 with her honorary
godmother "Mama Broyels".
(Westover family photos)

On a personal level my mother eradicated any sense of racial difference for her children by encouraging us to befriend black kids in our neighborhoods and at school. Because of this my best friend in junior high was a black kid named Tony Davis. We were inseparable and even broke in to MGM studios together running into a casting agent who was so amused by our “forwardness” that he cast us in a film.

It’s strange when your last parent passes. When my dad, Lawrence Robert, died, I was 31. He only lived to 58 but he and mom had a powerful love, so powerful that mom never remarried--out living dad by 25 years! 

My husband, Tom, told me a lot of soul searching begins when the last parent is buried. 12 hours into mom’s passing it has already begun for me.

Without her influence of equality for all I would have been a very different person.

Without her constant and emphatic insistence on forgiving all who had harmed her I would be a very different person.

Without her love for the arts and humanities I would be a very different person.

And, without her love for God, and the Universe He created, I would most certainly been a different person.

As the sediment of life with my “crazy” mom is sifting away, now faster than ever, the peaks and valleys are coming into stark relief and I am beginning to see this woman as the complicated, loving, angry, forgiving, defiant, selfish and generous person she was and will be remember by those who knew and loved her.

Welcome to heaven, mom, where the only skin color is the light of Love.

Mom and dad shortly before they were married in 1957.
(Westover family photos.)

(I have included this link to a testimony my mother wrote many years ago. I can think of no better eulogy as the highest mountain peak of her life—risking her life to save another: https://sentinel.christianscience.com/issues/1967/9/69-39/one-summer-afternoon-while-at-the-beach-with-my-four-children