One Mother's Thoughts On George Floyd's Burial Day

         These days, with murder victim George Floyd looming large in minds and hearts all across the planet, I sometimes find myself thinking about his mother, the person he cried out for in his final agonized breath as the life was being slowly, painfully crushed out of him.
         “Momma!”  George Floyd called out, “Momma! I’m through.”  George Floyd's mother died two years ago. But if she were still alive how would her heart not be shattered? When would her pain ever end? What mother doesn't feel a stab of pain reading those words and imagining her own child being so cruelly and heartlessly tortured to death, their murder carried out as a public horror show?
      William Shakespeare wrote, "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." 
        If George Floyd's mother were still alive I wonder if she would ponder in her sorrow the greatness that was thrust upon her son in that most terrible way. I wonder if she would cull any comfort today, knowing that as his body is laid to its final rest in Houston, Texas,

...from his death has been born a great national movement demanding police reform, social justice, and racial equality. I wonder if she would have been able to wrap her mind around the fact that her son, the child she held in her arms and watched grow from babyhood to boyhood to manhood, would, in the last eight minutes and forty-seven seconds of his life, change the world, change history and be forever remembered and revered.
      And I wonder if George Floyd's mother would trade all the good his death will bring about, all the everlasting honor his name will invoke, just to have her son back again.
       Today, on the day of George Floyd's burial, as his mother cannot be there to say a few words of love to her son, this mother would like to offer a few words. 
       Mine are not the words his own mother would say, but words from an old Joan Baez song decrying the death of two Italians at the hands of the American justice system, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti - who may have been victims of bigotry against their nationality - in 1920's. Their death brought about a national cry at that time for social tolerance and justice reforms for the working class.

   So today I offer Joan Baez's hauntingly beautiful, dirge-like song, "Here's To You," as my eulogy to George Floyd.

   I've changed the original names to his name: 

Here's to you, George
Rest forever here in our hearts
The last and final moment is yours
That agony is your triumph

     May you be with your mother now.