Requiem
Thursday, June 11th, 2009She outlived everyone she knew.
When Mrs. Lucile died on Sunday, Squirrelly and I had spent much of the weekend at Relay for Life and at an event in Obion County called Walk of Hope. We were in the car when the call came.
SQ’s grandmother, who was 98 years old, was dead.
I’ve heard people say this week that it was for the best, as Alzheimer’s had ravaged her spirit and her small body over the past few years, but there was still anguish over her passing.
Death is always a reminder of our own mortality.
I sat on the sidelines trying to be helpful but in all honesty, I felt mainly unnecessary. So I just watched and listened, tried to make sense of it all as the dying, and ultimately death, tends to make us see things more clearly on what is important and what is background noise.
Mrs. Lucile was born in 1911, became a teacher in 1929 and married her husband Melvin in 1933.
She had a prearranged funeral as many of the folks I know that are older sometimes do. The minister she requested had died some time back. The pallbearers she named for her funeral were all gone as well.
She was the last one left of a fierce tight knit farming community. Those folks she was friends with and that she worked with over decades had all passed on years ago. She was the last one that represented another century that has passed on to leased farms, subsidized agribusiness and corporate interests. She lived in a time when you worked your land and your land took care of you.
Things have changed over a century.
I thought a great deal over the past few days without the distraction of the internet over death and a life well-lived. Usually there is much fanfare over the passing of a relative. For Mrs. Lucile, I think there was relief as she was tired. She lost her husband 18 years ago and according to SQ, in many ways her grandmother died a little bit with him when he took his last breath.
It’s a generation that we will never see again. Mrs. Lucile saw two World Wars, she never drove a car, she fought cancer, she became a teacher but retired from that profession about the time that SQ and her sister were born and went a huge portion of her life without a television. Her life was her small school that she taught at, the family’s rather impressive farm and her church. She didn’t need anything else.
The “new” world evaded her in some respects (as it did for one of my grandmothers as well) and she found comfort with her Bible and a sharp tongue that would make a grown man hang his head in shame if you were on the receiving end of her disapproval.
She lived alone until two and a half years ago. It was the Alzheimers’ that ultimately sent her to a local nursing home. That disease is a cruel one, my friends.
I never knew Mrs. Lucile healthy, per se. She always called me Stacy (more people do than you would think) but she had a nice smile and she loved SQ and was always kind to me although I sometimes confused her. They are alike in many ways from what her family said and it was most likely Mrs. Lucile’s retired teacher that taught SQ to constantly want to learn and to excel in what she did.
And it was SQ that cried the hardest as her grandmother’s 86 pound body lay in the white casket, remembering the woman that taught her math and played board games with her when she was a child. But the grandmother of her youth had been a long time.
She is now with her beloved husband who was taken from her nearly two decades ago. And she is with a son, who she never knew had died three years ago.
Godspeed Mrs. Lucile. .
