Saying goodbye to a marvelous friend

I return to Tennessee today without any sense of accomplishment, only loss. Deep loss. Wounding loss. Loss that will never go away despite a flood of reassurances and sincere statements of consolation.

I've had to say goodbye a most marvelous friend and the most influential person in my life, Vita Hernandez Chavez.

She was so much more than a mother. She was a ciitzen of the world, who loved people and politics -- which by its definition is of the people. As much as love her, I respected and admired her.

She got me involved in political writing and her name was taken inside the Oval Office, to the Attorney General's office and on the 2004 campaign trail to Los Angeles and then Democratic Party presidential nominee John Kerry. He received her personal endorsement and responded with appreciation. I told then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that Momma hated his boss. He laughed. Then I added, "but she loves you." To that, he told his assistant to get him a picture that he could autograph personally for my mother and send to her. It was a nice gesture, and perhaps a private acknowledgement that he had learned to hate his boss, too, after Guantanamo Bay, the torture memo and the firing of the U.S. attorneys.

I always was proud to call myself a "momma's boy." That is what I was. And that is what I will remain.

In her final years, after losing her husband of 55 years, Vita Hernandez Chavez faced her most severe adversity in battling the lifelong scars of diabetes. This malady continues to wreak disproportional havoc on Hispanics. We've got to a better job of helping our elders battle this disease. But that's for another column post.

Today's piece is for my mother and her incredible legacy of family and faith, achievement amid so much adversity because of the color of her skin and the poverty of her beginnings.

She put all of her soul into her children -- myself and my two brothers, Gerald and Mike. We all are better people because of her, particularly from the example she showed in her fight in the last years of her life.

We believe she has returned to heaven, and is there with my father, her mother Luz Olmos Hernandez and her three fine sisters, Rita, Mary and Pauline.

That belief is consolation in her parting. Yet selfishly, I must confess it is not enough for me. The loss of her marvelous presence is just too high a price to pay. But we accept, because that was the faith in God she gave to us and lived most preciously in her final years.

Goodbye Momma. Thank you for a life lived so heriocally and so marvelously. I will never forget, and I will never cease to mourn.