A Memorial

 

In the Texas panhandle near the town of Hereford is an even smaller town called Earth. It was between these towns,  that a cemetery lies, like a tiny island of shrubs, trees and stones in an otherwise empty sea of open farmland and prairie. I was there only once; as a teenager when I was at the funeral of a relative. After the funeral I wandered away from everyone else to look around.. The only sound was the prairie wind singing a lullaby through the leaves of the trees, like the shadows in my heart, and as I listened and felt it’s comforting touch, I looked around and noticed a beautiful marble headstone almost as tall as me, and on it there was an old black and white photograph inside a little hinged door. In the picture was a pretty dark haired girl with big dark eyes: she was born in May, 1914; died September, 1918. The personal inscription read something like "Here lies our  little girl, who died in 1918 of the Spanish Flu, we will love her for always, and hope that God remembers her too."

We refer to the science of remembering as mnemonics. One place in the bible where this word is also used is at John 5:28, 29 "Do not marvel at this, because the hour is coming in which all those in the memorial tombs will hear his voice and come out." The original Greek word is mnēmei´on,  is derived from the verb meaning "to remember" or "to memorialize." Some Bible translations may render this Greek word by the one word "tomb" in English, but the word "tomb" does not fully express the meaning of the original Greek word because "tomb" in the Greek is derived from the verb that means "to cut, to hew, or to dig." But the Greek word mnēmei´on includes the thought of being remembered or of remembrance. Jesus did not use the plural of the Greek word ta´phos, which means "grave" or "burial ground." The thought here is that everyone who is in the memory of God will live again.

The reason why this memorial of a little girl has a special meaning to me now is because not only of the empathy I have for others, but also because of the link with my Father. The Spanish flu was a terrible plague that swept around the world , and within a few months in the fall of 1918 it killed at least 20 million people. At the time that little girl was dying, my grandmother was dying too. She was pregnant with my Father and he was born two months premature. As she lay on her deathbed she made her sister promise to help take care of Peter, her oldest son, Paul, the next son, and John, who was my Father and who had just been born. She didn’t know that Peter had already died. My grandmother and uncle were buried in unmarked graves, Paul was raised by his father, and my father was adopted by his aunt. They were poor people who got by doing odd jobs and farm work and lived in a covered wagon for four years. They did have a hard time keeping a premature baby alive, and more so since he was allergic to milk. At some point in his childhood he had scarlet fever so bad that it turned one of his brown eyes blue. He only had a third grade education before he left school to work and he grew up in the depression.

I was the sixth of seven children and when I was 8 he was in an accident when a train hit his pickup, and he was thrown twenty feet and broke his head open. My mother, because of her religious beliefs, refused to give permission for a blood transfusion, so he was left in the hallway to die. The nurses could not even change his bandages without permission from a doctor. My mother had only completed a seventh grade education and had never worked outside of the home, and there were still six kids living at home. All the older kids were there along with my mother and there was nothing that they could do . However our friends found a doctor in Houston who was willing to drop everything in his own practice, fly to Amarillo, pro bono, and work without blood to save my father’s life.My oldest sister is not religious at all but she said that the doors suddenly burst open and the man in a white coat looked like an angel, and without a pause he started to take charge and give orders and the nurses rushed around to follow his instructions

. The other doctors said that he wouldn’t live, when he did live they said that he would never wake from his coma, when he did wake up they said that he would never walk again. One day , according to the story my sister tells, a big black nurse came into the room where he had been lying in for some weeks, and she had a broom in her hand. She said "Are you just going to lie there? I need some HELP!!" My father struggled to sit up, then he managed to get off the bed and took the broom from her. He wasn’t showing off. It never occurred to him in his entire life to try and impress other people. The reason he got out of that bed was because he really believed that this lady needed help, and he never turned down the opportunity to get to know other people or to help them if he could, and he always believed that other people were telling him the truth.

  I never knew him to tell a lie or to say anything bad about others. He really wasn’t capable of making a judgment about other people but accepted them as does a child. I did not know him much before his accident and wondered what kind of person he was before. He could never work again but eventually he could do little odd jobs now and then. Once when I was sixteen we were cutting some weeds and putting in some posts for a corral. When one of the holes was dug for the posts I saw a dung beetle had fallen in, and I waited to see if he noticed. I was leery about touching it myself because it had those huge pinchers, and it was just a beetle. My father didn’t say a word, but without a pause he lay down on his stomach, reached down into the hole and brought the beetle up in his hand and let it go before he put the post in. He wasn’t showing off, and never said a word about it afterward. I never had a meaningful conversation with him and assumed that he was different before, but my older brother said that it was the way he had always been. I think that he never grew up in some ways, because of what he had been through and because he never had a childhood. He loved to visit with people, had no interest in sports, and told the same jokes over and over again. I think of him as a very ordinary person, but in an extraordinary way.

I was there the day he died, along with my daughter and a few of my brothers and sisters. My daughter played her violin for him, and we each took a turn saying something to him. When it was my turn I held his hand and told him that I would be there when he woke up again. I think that someday I’ll plant a garden for him and an orchard, because he always love to garden and I’m sure he would again when it’s God’s time to remember him. I also told him that he would have the chance to get to know Peter, the brother he never knew, and the mother who never had the opportunity to see her baby grow up. I hope to meet that little girl also; and meet her parents, and watch her run and play on the prairie again.

Bambootiger