The Most Awful Death

My great-grandmother was always an icon of strength and love to me.  She made me feel worthwhile and valuable in spite of my shame for my foot.  In fact, she was the midwife of the community when she was young.  As my mother went into labor and my father rushed off for the local doctor who returned with him, my great-grandmother asked him if he was going to birth me.  He said my mother had a long way to go, the fourth child for her to deliver.  My great-grandmother, Lillie, snapped, "Fine, sit there and smoke your cigarette and I will deliver the baby" and she did.  The first comment about me was made by her when she asked my mother if she saw the foot.  My mother said she did.  I was told the left foot was wrapped around the right foot.  Over the years, my elder sister who pointed out my shame told me that my mother had a hernia when she carried me from catching 100-pound oat sacks thrown to her by my father.  They did not have the money for surgery to correct it.  Also, my two older sisters had been staying with relatives in town to go to school and came home around the time my mother was carrying me with measles.

My great-grandmother dressed for burial all of her children who died as adults from tuberculosis.  I only have pictures of them, a family portrait of Lillie and her four children all in the same material.  Apparently a bolt was bought or all the flour sacks collected had the same design.  I never found out the reason why, but Lillie only had relations with 2 out of my mother's siblings, my mother and her eldest brother.

Lillie was ever the realist and she would come and stay with our family for several days and then return to her little two-room house in the nearby town with her living on old-age assistance from the state, the royal sum of $45 a month.  It allowed her to have a protein source of canned hominy and she grew her vegetables until she died at the age of 96.  All offers of food from my parents were politely declined, including meat.

When my parents had the dairy they kept 3 large barns filled with oats.  Thus about 30 cats were maintained on milk and mice.  When great-grandmother came to visit she usually told my mother that there were too many cats around and mysteriously litters of new-born kittens disappeared.  Thus, she kept our cat population  to the level of available nutrition.  After she died and no one culled the overpopulation, all the cats died from an infectious disease.

In the worst of the 1950s drought, the incidence of rabies became almost epidemic.  My dad's dog saved his life as a rabid fox attempted to bite him and his dog fought the fox to death, getting bit numerous times.  The brain of the fox was sent to the state and it confirmed the rabies.  My father was told to keep his lifesaving dog penned until the results were back.  My father had to shoot the dog that saved his life.

My great-grandmother was visiting one day during that fearful time.  My sister and I were outside playing some kind of pretend game and our play became a fight of wills, shouting, and anger.  I looked up to see my beloved great-grandmother standing there with a gun.  I had never seen her handle a gun and was amazed.  While she inside, I began to believe that she must have said to my mother hearing our vicious argument, "Dorothy, there are just too many children around here!"  Since I knew the youngest kittens always disappeared and I knew in my heart that she killed them, I knew I was the choice to go.  I was strangely calm knowing I was about to die, knowing in my heart that it was necessary, and waited for the gun's explosion.  But Lillie very quietly said, "Girls, I want you to walk slowly and get behind me.  Do not run, just walk, and get behind me, right now."  As soon as we were behind her, she shot and a fox where we had been dropped dead.

She died when I was 18.  She always said a person would always be alive if someone remembered them.  I will always remember her and love her.  I am crying now just thinking of her whereas I can think of many other persons in my birth family and not shed a tear.  She was the incarnation of how we used to be in the 19th century, strong, courageous, loving, adaptable, creative, and realistic.  The hard truths of the 19th century had taught her a great deal and I so wish she was here to continue to teach these truths to me.

Some religions speak of loved ones waiting at the end of the tunnel at our death.  I hope to see her and my father there if it is so as well as my first Siamese cat and the one I have now if I outlive her!  And my dogs, Smokey and Nellie and Bliss and Pro and Patches.  The do say that old age returns you to childhood too.