We stood in the middle of the kitchen, my arms wrapped around her while she cried. I was young, perhaps 14.

While I hugged her, I urged, “Mom, please leave. We don’t need him.”

From my earliest memory around the age of five until her death when I was 40, I watched Mom cry a lot. For the 40 years that I knew her I saw distress and pain cross her face at least weekly.

Two years after her death she remained a victim. The person responsible to pay for her tombstone – my dad – failed to do so and it was repossessed by the stonecutter. Mom’s grave was amongst those of her extended family; her mom, dad, uncles and aunts going back generations.

The graveyard was near to her mother’s church in Sampson County, North Carolina, an area that had a culture of old-time, southern farmers. What would they think about the bare spot created by the removal of Mom’s headstone? The continued humiliation of my mother, two years after her death, hurt.

Watching one’s mother being humiliated will break a boy. It will break a man. It will break a Marine. It will break a tower hand. It will break a CEO. It broke me as a little boy who could do nothing to stop it. But as an adult I could do something.

While traveling to the stonecutter’s yard to make it right I stopped into a church much like my grandmother’s, one of many such churches in Sampson County. That was a good thing.

Tears flowed before I parked and walked into the office to ask if I could use the sanctuary to pray. But words would not come out of my mouth. My sobs and my shakes were so overwhelming that I could not get the question out.

Sobbing in front of the secretary’s desk I pointed in the direction of the sanctuary. She knew what I was asking.

“Yes, go. Take all the time you need,” she said. The preacher popped his head out of the office but left me alone. God’s man was wise.

I sat down in the front pew to ask God for help. The tears flowed and the convulsions hit more than they had during Mom’s funeral. It felt like I was burying her a second time, and it was more painful than the first.

After a time, I returned to the secretary to thank her. Then I proceeded to the stonecutter and paid the $2,000 owed him. I also told him to keep that stone, ordered a better one and then paid for it in full.

In addition, I picked up the cost of making upgrades to the area not only around her grave but our extended family including those of PaPa and MeMa Holland which were next to Mom’s.

There would be no more humiliation of my mom.