WHO WE LOST
NEWTOWN — The way a young Charles Miller saw it, the cow in the middle of the road that night was going to eat his mother.
“I told her not to get out of the car,” said Miller, now 65, recalling a time in Newtown when it wasn’t uncommon for cows to wander into the road.
Despite his crying, his mother did get out of the car, using her know-how from growing up on her grandfather’s farm in Tobaccoville, N.C., to lead the large beast back to its field.
“See?” said his mother in her sweet, protective voice to her terrified son. “The cow didn’t eat me.”
In that way, Sadie Mae Miller negotiated the challenges of being a Black woman in postwar Connecticut, until the day she died from complications of the coronavirus.
“It was one of those days when it wasn’t too cold and I was allowed to visit her outside for 15 minutes with masks and social distancing,” said Charles Miller, recalling the last time he saw his 99-year-old mother on Aug. 12 at Apple Rehab in Rocky Hill. “She tried to stand up and kept hitting her legs, like she was say
ing, ‘ I’m ready to get out of here.’”
For Charles Miller, a 1973 graduate of Newtown High School who now lives in Rocky Hill, the grief is worse some days than others without his mother – one of nearly 5,000 people in Connecticut who have died coronavir us-related deaths since the pandemic str uck in mid-March.
“I say good morning to her ever y day,” Miller says. “I still see her walking around in the house.”
Known in Newtown as ‘Mama Sadie,’ for her community service and her talent for baking, Sadie Mae Miller had come north during World War II with a bachelor’s degree from Winston-Salem Teacher’s College, expecting Bridgeport to be an easier place than the south for a Black woman to find a class to teach.
“It wasn’t,” Miller recall s.
His mother worked in the defense industr y as a riveter, and then as a housekeeper before starting her own side business baking sweets for wedding receptions.
“She was a Cub Scout den mother and a member of the Ladies Auxiliar y at the Botsford Fire Company, and she was f antastic in the kitchen, catering small wedding cakes,” Miller said. “She always said, ‘treat somebody the way you want to be treated.’”
As important as her motherly love was to Charles Miller and his brother, Bobby, Sadie Mae Miller ’s example of gentle strength as a Black woman inspired Miller to see new possibilities.
“She had her own Sadielike way to put people in their place that was ver y lady-like,” Miller said. “So people looked around her color for the most part.”
But now, for the first time in his life, Miller doesn’t have his mother to go to with his grief.
He didn’t have a chance to speak his peace with her those final days in Apple Rehab – in part because his mother could no longer speak on the phone after suffering a stroke, and in part because COVID restrictions were tightening as a second wave of infections built momentum.
The funeral drew some of her closest friends, but not ever yone in the f amily could travel because of COVID bans.
Miller, who sold cars for 30 years, is left with her many kitchen pots and boxes of pictures and figurines she collected.
“I have good days and bad days,” Miller said.
What carries him through is Sadie Mae Miller never lost her sweet demeanor.
“She wasn’t one of those ones to sit around and boo-hoo,” Miller said. “If I was down about something, she would give me another way to look at it.”