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 that I had never met. After the funeral I wandered away from everyone else to look around. We were not within sight or sound of a road, and neither did I even hear a bird singing. The only sound was the prairie wind singing a lullaby through the leaves of the trees, as if through the shadows in my heart, and as I listened and felt it's comforting touch, I felt as clear as the cloudless sky above me.

Then as I looked around I noticed a beautiful marble headstone, aged with time and almost as tall as me. There was even an old black and white photograph inside a little hinged door. Inside of it I saw a pretty dark haired girl with big dark eyes, and it said she was born in May, 1914; died September, 1918, of the Spanish flu. It was as if the heart broken parents, spending everything they could, were saying "Please remember her...". By the time, though, I read those words, everyone who knew her were gone also.

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 mnÄ“mei´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 mnÄ“mei´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. Some friends found another doctor and he burst into the scene and started to take charge and give orders. 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 just 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 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 he told the same jokes over and over again. When he couldn't work anymore he spent some of his time walking around town and making friends or doing things for other people when he could. He also still enjoyed gardening and his favorite time was in the evening when he watered the garden with his thumb over the hose end.

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, and he could 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 watch her run and play on the prairie again.

                                                                    Bambootiger

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