I once heard your life flashes before your eyes when you are dying. I think about that a lot. Dying. And the remembrance of the life I’ve lived. I’m not afraid to die, I’ve been waiting for it for a long time, actually. Not that I want to die, but just… Well. Let me explain. All that waiting leaves time for reflection. So, here are my reflections. Do with them what you will, but it is my hope that you will learn a thing or two here; that you will experience my joy and pain, laughter and heartbreak within these pages. 

I was born in a small town: population of three-hundred fifty. Of course, my family made up most of that. I had twelve brothers and sisters. Both of my parents came from large families. You can imagine the reunions. Our house was a large wooden spectacle on top of a hill. It had a wrap-around porch and we would play under the stairs during the summer. It was simple back then: a single room for the seven of us girls, and another room for the five boys. My parents slept in the living room on a bed that folded into the wall. We had a large fire-place and a farm with a few cows and chickens and pigs. In the summer, we would haul sand up from the river bed to scrub the floors until we could see our faces reflected from the floor. At Christmas, we would cut down a large tree and make the decorations, mostly popcorn and cranberries hung on trees, and we would each get tins full of treats like oranges and apples and chocolate and jacks and balls. We were happy. And then we weren’t. 

The family fell upon hard times. I quit school after the sixth grade to help out. I babysat kids and woke up at four in the morning to cook. I washed laundry and cleaned houses to earn a few extra dollars a week. Boy, if I wasn’t a handful to deal with before, I certainly was after all that. I began to resent the boys and girls who didn’t have to work as hard as I did. I saw the money they had and the things they owned, and I was jealous. I let all of that fester in my heart until I was little more than a walking tornado full of wrath and anger. Friendship was hard to come by in those days, with good reason. I once dipped a girl’s hair in ink because I was jealous of the attention she was getting. I fought anyone who so much as looked at me sideways. And all the while, my parents were trying to earn just enough money to feed us twelve. 

Tragedy once again struck us when I was seventeen. The eldest of us, the twins, both worked outside the home to keep us afloat. Both worked in factories. Randall worked to make tractor parts, and Edwina worked in a sewing factory. One day, while at work, the twins decided to go out to lunch with their coworkers, celebrating Christmas early. By some sick twist of fate, the cars each twin was riding in collided with one another. Randall died before the paramedics could get there. Edwina died a few days later. Now, not only were we poverty stricken, but the load of our grief was too much to bear. My father went out back to the tool shed and shot himself in the head. My mother was in shambles. I was devastated. I wanted to be angry, but I felt next to nothing. Through it all, however, our community rallied together around us. People that I had been horrid to were making food. They helped around the house. Mostly, though, the thing that stuck out to me was the fact that they would come by just to check on us. Just sit down and talk and make us laugh and offer condolences and help. It was this revelation that sent me to church and social events and seek out this community. The frost in my heart was beginning to melt. 

One Sunday, the pastor gave a sermon on love. It wasn’t that love was a foreign concept to me, after all, I lived in a house where we were all very close and our parents showed us much affection. Having a big family does that. But something about this sermon was different. I remember the pastor quoting 1 Corinthians 13:13 “Right now three things remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” It was love that had brought our community around us in the midst of our heartache. At that moment, I decided that my days of wrath and vengeance were over. I joined a group that did charity work. I wrote letters to thank the members of our community. I did everything I could to show the love that I had received to others. It was through this work that I met my husband Jeremiah, a deacon of the local church and a devoted member of the community. He was ready to help at a moment’s notice. If you needed anything, he would make sure you got it, and then give you the shirt off his back for good measure. 

We fell in love and got married. We had three beautiful children: Lindy, Michael, and Ainsley. He worked for years at a music company, selling and producing gospel music. I worked in a sewing factory, like my older sister, and then we moved to a new house where I had all the land in the world to do with it what we could. We opened a chicken farm and I loved it. Much of our land was used by members of the community to build their own homes. We had ample of it and land was expensive back then, so Jeremiah would sell the land to them for low prices with no expectations. That’s just how he was. It was not always easy. When my mother died, my disabled sister Margot moved in with us. I was also taking care of several other sick family members full time, along with still running the chicken farm. My days consisted of nursing family members back to health, taking care of my sister, cooking, cleaning, sending my youngest daughter to school and spending time with her and my husband. By this time, I had two grand-children. They came to play and I would babysit them. My daughter lived behind our house. As we aged, our family only grew. We eventually had twelve grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren. Our house was nearly bursting at the seams when everyone came over on Sundays after church for dinner. It was good. 

Along with aging came the many… many health problems we faced. My husband had his first heart attack about twenty years ago. Then there were the gallbladder problems and his heart never really recovered. But, the real killer wasn’t any of those things. 

We all have those years in our lives that we do not look upon fondly. For various reasons. A few years back, apparently everyone suddenly caught the urge to die. By that time there were only eight of us siblings left. By the end of the year there were only four. Sisters and brothers-in-law died one by one. They… dropped like flies, as some may say. It started with my sister, Katherine. Then Magdelena. Then Lottie. Lottie’s husband Joe was next. Then my nephew was in a car accident. On and on and on. There was a running joke at our local funeral home that we were going to have to change our address there because we were in attendance so much. My family shrunk. Most of the deaths were long and hard-won. They were painful and not easy to watch. Through it all, my husband was the rock. He was the one who made arrangements, sang, and settled family disputes. We couldn’t have done it without him. Little did we know, a quieter, but much more deadly sickness had taken root within him that would come to light by the end of the year. 

It started with little things. The glassy eyes and occasionally forgetting where he put things. Then it progressed into not remembering names or forgetting where he was. He developed hallucinations, often he was convinced there were cats in our kitchen and he’d watch them cross the floor. He couldn’t sleep at night. All of these things were simply symptoms of a greater problem: Lewy Body Dementia. My youngest daughter took the news the hardest. She did countless hours of research that came to one result: it was incurable, and it would only get worse. He was prescribed countless medications that didn’t really do anything to help his deteriorating condition. For five years, my family and I watched his decline. I was tied to him. After all, I’d been with him for fifty-seven years. We had never spent more than a day apart in all that time. Yet now, though his body was physically there, his mind was far off. Some days were better than others. He would stay with my granddaughter and they would make boxcars and she would cook him food while I got out of the house. He would have conversations with us and know exactly who we were and what we were doing. Lewy Body Dementia is a silent killer. It steals your memory, your personality, everything that makes you, you. I say killer, but, in fact, that is not what killed my husband. 

Christmas had come and gone and it had been a wonderful time. Something nagged at me, but I put it off. I just had this feeling. Right before New Years’, he had had a problem and we thought we had lost him. Then, my youngest daughter got sick and had to stay away for fear of getting all of us sick. He was doing well. The nurse even said that he was more physically fit than me. And then he just. Died. I never got to say goodbye. My daughters and son came to the house. We called the funeral home. While we waited, we sang songs and played the piano. I like to think he was there listening as we sang him to Heaven. When the funeral home came and took him away from us, my youngest daughter curled up in the bed he had been laying in. His funeral was a solemn event. He knew everyone. Never met a stranger. I think everyone in three counties came through that funeral home. He was buried on a cold day around noon. I don’t remember much of those days. By that time, I had been apart from him longer than I had been in over fifty years. I do remember this one thing, though: it snowed the day we put him in the ground. He loved the snow. It felt like a final goodbye. We came to my house and had lunch that day. My family stayed for a long time. But then, one by one, they all left. I was left all alone in a home that had housed some of the greatest memories I’d ever made. My husband and I had lived here together for forty years. It was our second house. For all of those years, it had been me and him against the world. There was constant singing and laughing and people coming in and out. And now, it was silent and I was alone. 

I was diagnosed with liver cancer and caught shingles in my eye again. I nearly clawed a hole in my head. My daughters were very concerned about my well-being. My son… well, I’m not sure he even knew anything was wrong. As my health declined, they wanted to put me in a nursing home, but I would not go. I wouldn’t leave the place where I’d lived the better part of my life to go somewhere else. 

I began to excessively cook and clean and work my fingers to the bone. My house was too big for just me, but I refused to move out because this is where my husband had lived and died. What was I if he wasn’t there? So, no, I didn’t move. I stayed right there and lived the same day over and over again. I lived for the days when my family would come over and break the silence, but when they inevitably left again, it was just me in that silent, dark house. 

In that silence, my favorite pastime was looking through photo albums. Many people there had been dead a long, long time, but those photos transported me back to the very moment they were taken. I was transported back to happy and sad times. It’s funny isn’t it? Remembering is the thing that hurts the most, but it is also the thing that soothes your soul in moments where it is raw and open and festering. 

The remembrance of my own story now has been a balm to my soul. I hope you laughed and cried along with me, and learned a thing or two. I hope you see now that jealousy and hatred will not get you anywhere in your life. It is exhausting to be angry. Sure, there are moments for it, but to live that way would be an unnecessary waste of life. I hope you experience the type of happiness I’ve felt. And though I wish it wasn’t, grief is a necessary part of life. The experience of it makes the absence of it more appreciable. I hope you one day love something or someone enough that when it is gone, it feels as though your heart has been ripped out of your chest. Love that way. Love unapologetically. Love everyone. Love a lot. Yes, it hurts. Yes, sometimes you wish it would go away. But it is this type of loving, and remembering in love, that has been a comfort to me in this, my last hour. Thank you all for listening to my story. I guess it’s true: your life really does flash before your eyes when you’re dying. I can proudly say I’ve lived a life I’m proud of.