15 years ago today, I received a phone message from my mother, and she ended the message with a kind of gasp. I called back and didn't get an answer. It didn't alarm me much because I assumed she had fallen asleep.
The next morning I called and when I didn't get an answer I called my brother in law and my sister checked and found she had died either during the night or that morning
Later we found she had called all of us children, and many of her friends and relatives like she knew it was her last day.
The services were in Soldier, Kansas, near where we lived on a farm near Holton, Kansas for many years. When I was a child, I remember visiting the Soldier Cemetery on Memorial Day to visit the graves of my Grandfather and Grandmother. The Soldier Community is a unique small Community which maintains the Cemetery in pristine condition and also maintain a community center. The people in the community still provide a lunch on Memorial Day and provide catering for funerals. It is a very unique city. We visit and find the tradition continues, the Cemetery is in excellent shape and the community center, with the outside playground, is still in excellent shape.
The week of the funeral was beautiful fall weather. As I watched the leaves turn, I wondered why the end of human life couldn't be as beautiful as the end of Summer. My Mom would have appreciated the fact that an American Indian presided at the services and he told stories about her life he learned from talking with all of us about her life.
15 years later, I still have a problem reviewing the papers of her early life, with all the hopes and dreams of the young. I review them and I think it makes me see her more as the individual person she was rather than my mother, which she also was.
It is difficult to imagine that 15 years have gone by since that day in 1997. As I age, I appreciate more and more both what Mom and Dad went through, although I can't imagine how they did it with seven children to care for.
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