Wade’s Wramblings #5 - Death Death has been on my mind a lot lately. I would guess that it is because there are so many deaths are happening right now. I am sure this is nothing new to you as we are at the age at where it is expected mostly for our parents and then us. It all started when I was around 3 years old and my grandfather on my mother’s side died. Even though I was at such an early age, somehow I was able to absorb the entire process of dying and the associated funeral. Everyone was crying so that made me cry. We were on our way back home on an old dirt road for about 80 miles and it was in the middle of nowhere. We had an old Ford and it broke down about half way home. I asked my dad what happened to it and he said it had died. Relating to my grandfather’s death, I started to cry. They asked me what was wrong and I told them if it was dead, how are we going to get home. They laughed at me and told me not to worry that they could fix it and get home. Now confusion set in and you can understand my dilemma. Then all my aunts and uncles started dying. My dad was the youngest of 8 boys and 3 girls so you can see I had a lot of funerals to go to. The same was true on my mother’s side of the family as she was the youngest of 5 children. As I got older, they always asked me to be a pallbearer. This included carrying the casket to the hearse and then unloading it at the cemetery. We also had to collect all the flowers, carry them to a van and then unload all of them at the cemetery. We never had to purchase burial lots as every church had their on cemetery lots. Through the following years miscellaneous people such as co-workers passed away. My wife always read the obituaries in the newspaper and I always trusted her to let me know when she saw someone we knew. And now that I myself have become of age in which a lot of my friends are passing, I have started reading them myself. I even found it to be pretty interesting seeing a persons story. They seem to have had hundreds of kinfolks and children. And the most fascinating thing is all their accomplishments. It is strange to think you know someone and then to find out you didn’t know them at all. One example is finding for the first time that they had served in the military. Most of our dads served in the military and their deaths are accompanied by a United States flag draped over the coffin and a gun salute at burial. It is so fascinating to see the flag being folded up into a triangle and handed to the widow. My mother still has dads flag and it is stored in a triangular wood frame with a glass cover. For the most part deaths seem to come with old age but so often they are due to some sickness or an accident. I don’t know if mine will be from old age or sickness, I just want to be like that old Ford so they can fix me and let me keep going. I wonder what happened to that old car.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:45:08 +0000
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