Family Funerals

It has taken me a week to gain perspective on a family funeral I attended. 

My family requires months, even years of perspective. If you have read any of my Hold Everything Lightly series, above, you might understand. My great Aunt K. died, she was just shy of ninety. When I was much younger I used to spend time with her but I have not seen her recently. One of my aunts and her daughter have been faithful to visit and care for her. Unfortunately much of what they did for her will go without credit.

I almost walked out of the church because someone was there who hurt me terribly when my beloved daddy died. It took every fiber of my being and the grace of God to hold me in place. Then my Big Sister came in the door and I did not know what she might do because she is far more volatile than I and was involved with that whole incident. My sister did not recognize me.  I have grey hair, have lost weight, and had on heels. A vast difference than my former look when she saw me last year. Yes, it was at least a year since I have seen my sister. We do talk on the phone however. We sat together and she told me she nearly left when she saw the person who caused us so much pain when we were mourning our dad. We are united in that we are the two children left of our parents. Our brother, Fred, was killed by a drunk driver fifteen years ago. Mom had more children later. 

. It was dizzying for me to see friends from high school grown yet strangely the same. They did not recognize me(grey hair strikes again). We saw a vast array of first cousins, cousins thrice removed, aunts, and uncles. Upon reflection I noticed neither preacher who spoke mentioned my great uncle who married my aunt 58 years ago. I do not think that an accident. He was mean and hateful. He was my grandfather's brother.

Going to my hometown is too strenuous and intense for me.

I cannot do it with perspective or grace anymore. 

Too many ghosts of the past lurk there. 

The scary part is they have a pulse.

 joy and peace

Olive

Hold Everything Lightly #6 {FIVE YEARS FOUND}

This installment was tougher than I thought it would be so I am re-stating what I said in part one.
 I do not intend to sully the memory of my parents but to tell the story as it was told to me and as I remember it. I am as imperfect as they were and I believe we are all damaged in some way. 
I loved my parents.
I love them still.

I did not see my mother in pants until she started working in the mid 1970's.

 It was a tumultuous time for our family. The thinly woven threads that she and daddy had made together had become unraveled. Mother, domineering as she was, never allowed daddy to participate in any parenting decisions. Daddy let her get away with that and missed out on my childhood and my siblings. As a result he found someone else.
Not that I approve of his affair, but she pushed him out the door. 

I remember being eleven years old sitting in the backseat of mama's car
and mama and big sis driving from motel to motel looking for daddy and his girlfriend. Eventually after an exhaustive search mama found them at a cheap, shady motel. My big sister, after being sent to a state girl's school, was tough and mean.  One really was best not messing with her.
Daddy had a bad day that day.

Not to be undone by daddy, mother got her a boyfriend.

 A hardscrabble type, big and muscular in contrast to my tall and skinny father. Mother's mantra was " all men are terrible, never trust a man, men will hurt you" and on and on she went. It was not a peaceful transition between men, if that is possible. I recall that man, Billy, banging my dad's head against a concrete wall.  Daddy moved back to our hometown of Jackson near the Savannah River Site, the nuclear plant where he worked. When I turned thirteen mother decided that I should live with daddy.
She dropped me off and that was that.  I felt abandoned and scared once again.
I had been told so many times how awful my father was.

Mother was completely and totally wrong about daddy as a parent.
 He was a wonderful father. He was quiet, kind, smart, and stern when required.  Daddy read three newspapers each day and watched the news every evening. He was informed about the world. I cooked for him most days. It was incredibly easy because he ate meat and potatoes and meat and potatoes. One of my duties was to drive daddy to work because he had lost his license due to drinking. Daddy was, at that time, a functional alcoholic. He drank on weekends and never lost his job. It was nothing for me to drive him to the plant in my robe. I didn't need my license because at thirteen I did not have one. After a while it got around in our small town that I was driving without a license. The Chief of Police eventually stopped me but it was the very week I obtained my license.
 He probably let it go all those years, a twisted version of small town justice.


 Daddy and I had five lovely years together.
I stayed out one night, with my church group, until the unwholesome hour of four AM bowling when I was sixteen. Daddy did not say one word he simply decided to hammer on the roof all day. He had a sense of humor like that. Daddy drove an El Camino, one of those silly half cars half trucks. After he retired (he got his license back and quit drinking) he would drive to the Savannah River and walk along the banks. I believe he found peace there. He often would dig up pottery and artifacts out of the clay banks of the river. He also had a love for the past. I graduated from our small town's high school as Salutatorian and daddy paid for my college education as a registered nurse.
He let me marry at age eighteen.
I wish he had said "No" to my marrying so young but he was not one to confront others.
Besides, we would not have my daughter CC and she is our special gift no matter what happened later.

My precious daddy died in 2006, after a long illness, but I am not finished with his story. 
Not yet.

"Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts, when God pries your fingers open."

---Corrie Ten Boom 1892-1983 

To read other parts of this series click on Hold Everything Lightly at the top of the page.  
Nuclear tells of daddy's family history.

 ♣

Bless you for reading

Olive

Hold Everything Lightly #4 {Lester}

I am six years old and sitting in the biggest black car I have ever seen.

 The back seat is strange and would hold my Sunday School Class. I ask mama why we are in this car and she starts sobbing. I ask to go to the bathroom. The long black car is parked in front of my Aunt Vera's house and I have not been allowed in there for days.

The long black car was a limousine used during Aunt Vera's funeral procession and that scene above is all I remember about it. I do not remember seeing Uncle Lester at all in the days after I found her unresponsive on the sofa. She died of a stroke later that day. Mama took me to her and daddy's house four houses up the street and that was that. Uncle Lester was the only father figure I had at this time and suddenly he was gone. I simply adored Uncle Lester and Aunt Vera. They were my world. About six months later he called mama, who was his half sister, and invited her to meet his new friend Edith. 

Mama and I went to Edith's house in South, Augusta.
I can still picture that house, small on the left side of the street with colorful flowers blooming and facing a drive in movie theater. Edith was all sugar and syrup. Far too sweet if you know what I mean. She had outlived one husband and divorced another and had two grown daughters. Lester and Edith met at Clark's Hill Lake. That lake looms large over me somehow.  Uncle Lester and Aunt Vera owned a lot and small trailer at The Lake (capitalized in my head) and I caught my first fish there when I was two. The Lake is why I ended up living with my aunt and uncle in a round about way. Meanwhile mama and Lester were talking in the kitchen and Edith took me in the back yard and held be by the shoulders and shook me and said she was going to be Uncle Lester's wife from now on and he was to have nothing to do with me. Did I understand? I was six year old child. I said nothing. She was not my Aunt Vera and she was taking Uncle Lester away from me. How could this be?
The Lake gives and it takes away.

When we got home I told mama.
 She called Edith on the phone and much unpleasantness ensued as my mama was someone not to cross. I saw Uncle Lester three more times in my adult life. He came to my wedding twelve years later and is seen in the wedding photos although I do not remember him being there. He was admitted to my hospital where I was a RN, for throat cancer, and I visited with him. After that I drove to their place on The Lake and sat with them one day while he was sick. He died on July 4th when CC was two.  He never saw her. I did not attend the funeral. Sometimes I regret that. Edith did mail me photos of Lester, Vera, and me.

 I have never quite gotten over Uncle Lester's rejection of me and his allowing Edith to manipulate him.

Her children were listed as his daughters on his obituary and that hurt me terribly.  As an adult I can forgive my uncle, as a child I was completely mystified and it colored my world for a long time.

This was my second lesson in holding that which I love lightly.

"Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts, when God pries your fingers open."

---Corrie Ten Boom 1892-1983 

To read parts one, two, and three of this series click on the page HOLD EVERYTHING LIGHTLY SERIES at the top of the blog to the right of CONTACT ME and it will take you to each post.
To read about Vera and The Lake go directly here.

-

Thank you for reading.

Olive

Hold Everything Lightly #3 {Mama and Vera}

Mama is from Hangingdog, North Carolina.

 It is a community of houses, churches, and a couple of stores scattered across the mountains in the western part of the state. It is remote and not a lot different now than when mama was  a child, except for the cabins with the designer kitchens. My grandaddy was an old widower with ten grown children when he married my young grandmother. They were dirt poor, meaning all that they ate came from what they could grow out of the earth or they did not eat. After fathering three children {one died} grandaddy died leaving my grandmother alone with two small kids in a tiny mountain cabin. I have a photo of my grandmother and two small dirty children standing in the doorway of an unpainted shack. They farmed the land and managed the hardscrabble life until grandmother died on my mothers fourteenth birthday of deep vein thrombosis {a blood clot} in her leg. Today she would have survived but not then and not in those mountains.

Mother moved to South Carolina to live with her much older half brother Lester and his wife, Vera.

 Uncle Lester had moved south to work at the large nuclear plant being constructed in Aiken county.  Lester and Vera had no children but longed for them. Vera was from Alabama and was traveling on a train when her appendix burst. She survived that emergency but was rendered infertile. God did by many strange ways provide her with four children. I was the fourth. She and Lester raised two boys from Alabama prior to mama's arrival. She had her hands full with my adolescent mother who had been cooped up in those mountains and now was close to a large city. It made for trouble, boy trouble. My mother was devoted to Aunt Vera as was anyone who knew her. In later years we were hesitant to speak Vera's name for mother would burst into tears. Vera impacted our lives with so much good it is hard to measure.

The account blurs for me here.

 I know that mother graduated from high school. Some where she meets daddy, a divorced man with two children.  I cannot see Aunt Vera approving of that at all. Perhaps my Grandaddy formidable as he was smoothed it over. Soon after I was born into that instant family of a brother and a sister. How I loved my big brother. My big sister who was old enough to remember her biological mother was rebellious and daddy not knowing any better at the time sent her off to the state girls schools for troubled youth. Dear Lord who could blame my sweet troubled sister for having her mother torn from her? Sending my sis to the girls school was an error on daddy's part as she came back badly scarred. Mama did the best she could with her new family and given her youth and temperament it was astonishing it lasted as long as it did.

For # 1 in the series go here

and for #2 here

Olive

Hold Everything Lightly #2 {Nuclear}

Mr. Charlie, my granddaddy, and his family lived on the quiet and fertile

 banks of the Savannah River in Ellenton, South Carolina.

 In November, 1950 the federal government decided to build the Savannah River Plant to make tritium and plutonium for H-bombs. The town of Ellenton was comprised of thirty businesses, two schools and one railway. The population had declined after the first World War and the Great Depression to 760. The towns of Dunbarton and Meyers Hill and other unincorporated areas would all be relocated. The sidewalks of Ellenton still exist but are strictly off limits to visit. In total 6000 people and 6000 graves were moved. Grandaddy had six of our family members moved to a new family plot in the Jackson city cemetery. He would build his house there on the perimeter of that cemetery with the help of his four sons. Grandaddy had a third grade education but was well read, self taught and managed to support his family. He was a strict disciplinarian to the point that his discipline crossed the line, smashed the line. I have been told, in my adult years, that he tied my daddy in the barn for hours at a time. I have no reason to doubt the veracity of this. I thought grandaddy to be harsh with my grandmother. He was impatient with her and she was frequently sick. My daddy would cringe every time mama would use corporal punishment. That I remember clearly.
Daddy never once spanked or hit us.

My daddy was the eldest son and joined the army and went to Texas.

 He returned to Jackson with a wife and two small children. Grandaddy, by all accounts, ran the wife off, and daddy divorced her. Shots may or may not have been fired and some one went to jail briefly. The boy and girl stayed with my grandmother. Was my grandaddy so intimidating that he could make this young mother leave her children? I cannot ask my brother and will not ask my sister. Daddy did not speak of that time in his history. It was all hushed. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for that young woman to leave her children.
This would effect my big sister for the rest of her life.

Grandmother Lois passed away when I was eleven. She was diabetic and just plain wore out. Grandaddy, alone and with no one to dominate, seemed to soften a bit and I spent many a day at his house and attended church with him at Green Pond Baptist Church at the edge of the nuclear plant. Grandaddy died in 1990. I was at his bedside, a grown woman, a registered nurse, and yet the Baptist preacher would not speak to me when grandaddy died that day.
I had left Green Pond Baptist church as an older teen and married young. 

In the preacher's mind I had joined a cult and renounced my faith, all fiction of course.
If one can be shunned from a particular Baptist church, I am your girl.

But that is jumping ahead of the story.

"Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts, when God pries your fingers open." 

---Corrie Ten Boom 1892-1983 

For part one go here. 
 Facts concerning Ellenton from Wikipedia.



Olive

Announcement

 An installment of the series Hold Everything Lightly I started last week 

will post on Wednesday morning 3/7/12. 

A wise friend and fellow blogger suggested it and I agree it is a good idea to go ahead.

If you did not read it yet part one is here.

The introduction is here.

I might leave you hanging for a moment but will eventually pull the threads of my stories together.

Thank you in advance for staying with me.

joy and peace

Olive

Hold Everything Lightly #1 {The Lake}

The installments in this series will not be an easy read nor easy for me to write.
 I do not intend to sully the memory of my parents but to tell the story as it was told to me and as I remember it. I am as imperfect as they were and I believe we are all damaged in some way. 
I loved my parents.
I love them still.

Charles and Kay were at Clarks Hill Lake, a large body of water that straddles the states of Georgia and South Carolina. Charles my father, by all accounts, was drinking and Kay, my mama, was hollering because she always was. It was 1964 and they were on a dusty dirt road in one of daddy's old cars. No one used seat belts in 1964. Daddy either hit the brakes or hit a stump in the road or both.
One could hardly tell if he was drunk, he held his liquor well.

 Until he passed out. Either way he wrecked that hot summer day on the Carolina side of the lake and mama's head struck the windshield with force. She was unconscious and he took her to University Hospital about thirty minutes away in Augusta, Georgia. She was admitted to the hospital for concussion. I was two years old and this would mark a seminal event in my life.

We lived on Carey Drive in Beech Island, South Carolina in the second house on the right. They were small houses, not mill houses, but almost with two bedrooms and one bath, most were one thousand square foot or less. My parent's house had a wispy weeping willow tree in the front yard and I always think of that little house when I see a willow tree. Mother's older brother Lester and his wife Vera lived four houses down from us. I went to live with them that day mama and daddy wrecked. Aunt Vera and Uncle Lester took me in during a critical time of my development and heaped love and attention upon me. They built me a bedroom onto the back of the house and bought me girly French Provencal furniture that I still have and will never part with. Mama and daddy loved me but fought frequently and there was a lot of chaos in contrast to my new family's home.

Living four houses from mama she was in and out all the time and is in all my elaborate birthday party pictures. I have few memories of daddy during this time and only two photos. In each photo I am sitting in his lap. My Aunt Vera was a gentle soft spoken woman who delighted in little surprises for me. One day I came home from school and there was string all over the yard and house and I was instructed to follow it. It lead to a pretty doll with ringlets in her hair. Vera was an expert seamstress and sewed most of my clothes and made intricate Barbie clothes too. My aunt and uncle taught me about living a daily life of faith that has never failed me even when I have stepped away from it. One day, when I was in first grade, I came home from school and my beloved Aunt Vera was laying on the sofa and I could not wake her. Vomit was all over the living room floor and my six year old mind did not comprehend what was happening.
I never saw her again.
 She died, at the hospital, a few hours later from a stroke. 

This would be the initial lesson in holding that which I hold dear lightly.

"Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts, when God pries your fingers open." 

---Corrie Ten Boom 1892-1983

♣♣♣

I have several installments written, as of yesterday, and will post in this series at the end of the month. I will let you know in advance. Thank you for your support and comments yesterday. Your comments mean more to me than you will ever know.
 

Olive