Death Visits

John lost his only remaining brother over the week end and things are different around here.  Tom was 14 years younger than John and  (with dementia) John can’t understand why he would go first.

There was actually two families.  John, an older brother and a little sister were the children in the 20’s; however, the sister died with diphtheria when she was two years old.  It was said that she got the illness from a cat, which she carried lots of the time.  Anyway several years passed before other children were born.

John and I’ve been married 69 years and Tom was four when we married.  We’ve been to family get togethers and the younger four would laugh and talk about things that happened that the older fellows knew nothing about.

Handling of deaths is a lot different today than it was back then.  In the old days bodies were kept at the home until burial time.  Neighbors and friends would set up at night and maybe take shifts doing so.

I’ve heard talk about when my daddy’s first wife died — February 1918.  She died during the flu epidemic and the weather was bitterly cold.  The undertaker drove mules to pull the hearse and he was located over in the valley — 12 miles away.  The mountain road was so frozen that he had to have special shoes put on the mules to get up the mountain.  She was “laid out” at home.  Didn’t even to go the funeral home. The cemetery was so frozen that a fire had to be built on the ground before the grave could be dug.

Times have changed, but death, too, is a part of country living.