I Begin Life on my Own

I made it back from Kentucky this afternoon. My dad’s viewing was on Friday, and he was buried on Saturday.

The first place where I had a meal outside of Florida was a Chick-fil-A in Georgia. I went to several Chick-fil-A’s on the trip. They treat customers so nicely, it made me feel better about everything. The first one I visited had fresh flowers on every table.

This, and not the food, is why Chick-fil-A dominates. People who hate Christianity will never understand that. Every employee is required to demonstrate an attitude based in Christianity.

The first place where I stayed was in Ooltewah, Tennessee. Very nice hotel, and very quiet. They had tourist brochures. I couldn’t resist taking one to read. Rock City. When I was a kid, and we drove to Kentucky or North Carolina, we passed endless mailboxes, barns, and outhouses bearing painted messages that read, “See Rock City.” My dad never stopped! I still wonder what I missed. He said it was a tourist trap. I forgive him, though.

I nearly took a side trip to another attraction, the Lost Sea, just to get a shirt. My dad actually let us see that one.

My caregiving experiences took over my life, and my blog reflects that. I don’t want to spend the next year as The Grief Blogger, trying to get sympathy from as many strangers as possible. Healthy people get over family deaths. They don’t milk them. I will try to keep that in mind as things wind down, but I still have a few things to say.

While my dad was going through his astonishing transformation, I routinely prayed for God to help him bear whatever fruit he could during his remaining days. God has been faithful to answer. Even before I left Florida, two boys who heard my dad’s story decided they wanted me to baptize them. My friend Mike, the hospice exec, sent employees to read my blog. In Kentucky, God added two more people to the list of those affected: my aunt and my cousin.

I will call my aunt Thelma and my cousin Louise in order to have names for them.

Thelma has been through a lot. She divorced young, and the aftermath was unpleasant. She has had a lot of anger and trials. Louise has also had problems. Her dad died in 2017, and it appears that she inherited very little. She says her brother and stepbrothers got what would otherwise have come to her. Her health is not good, and she has a son who has a serious heart defect. Things are not going well for her financially, and she hasn’t had a good relationship with God.

My mother’s parents had 8 grandchildren, and for some reason, two of them–Louise and my cousin JD–got much less attention than the rest of us. It’s a mysterious thing. I don’t know if they felt unwanted, but it always seemed like no one wanted to fuss over them the way they did over the rest of us.

Thelma had a stroke not long ago. I didn’t know about it. The family was blown apart by my grandparents’ failure to do proper estate planning, and by the way some people behaved after my grandparents died (If anyone I know is reading this, no, I did not get any of the good stuff), so communication is not what it used to be. That’s as much my fault as anyone else’s. She doesn’t appear to have any lingering effects from the stroke, but Louise is looking after her anyway.

Louise feels that Thelma, who was responsible for bringing her up as a Christian, focused too much on God’s anger and the end times. It turned her off and discouraged her. On my first night in Kentucky, the three of us talked until it was very late, and I told both of them as much as I could of what I had learned about God.

Louise has been hurt a lot, but she doesn’t seem bitter at all. She is very open to establishing a relationship with God. Before I left Kentucky, she let me pray for her, and we asked God to give her faith and show her he was real. I believe that was night before last. The seed was planted. Now I’m waiting to see what sprouts.

It’s a real privilege to be used to help someone in my family. Most of them won’t want my help (or anyone else’s) in the area of religion. For some reason, my relatives seem to think I’m stupid, even though I’m the most highly educated person in the family. I admit, I’m eccentric, but so are almost all of them. If my grandparents or any of their daughters had had a child that wasn’t eccentric, they probably would have taken it back to the hospital, fearing it had been switched.

You know what Jesus said. “A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.” I’m not saying I’m a prophet; I’m just citing a principal that applies to all people, in every area of life. We tend to dishonor capable people who are close to us. Oddly, we tend to honor outright fools instead.

The viewing was strange, but I thought it was great.

Including myself and the funeral director and his wife, there were 11 people. One cousin couldn’t make it because his boss wouldn’t turn him loose. One lives in Illinois and may have been busy; I haven’t heard from him, but he sent some nice flowers. My sister didn’t respond to my efforts to communicate with her. One aunt didn’t go because she was having blinds installed, and her husband stayed with her. I think everyone else is dead.

My understanding is that people from the town where my mother was born–the town where my dad was to be buried–had a gabfest about my dad’s death on Facebook, so I was afraid there might be more people than I could handle, but that didn’t pan out. I have deleted my dad’s Facebook account, so I don’t know what has been happening.

There was no church funeral. I was very tired, and I had no help, so I kept things simple. Thelma and Louise would have helped round up musicians and so on, but I figured very few people would come, and I didn’t want to put the burden on them. I decided to have a viewing and then say a few words at the grave.

I got some photos printed at Walgreen’s before I left. One showed my dad at the assisted living facility, eating brownies I made for him. The other was a photo of the life jacket God used to try to get his attention. I put these photos up beside my dad’s Amazon urn, and I hung the life jacket on a rack meant for flowers. I knew it was an eccentric thing to do, but I didn’t care. It was my show. I felt like the little red hen, eating her bread by herself.

The photos looked very good. Walgreen’s had some nice frames for $12.99 each, but they screwed up when I went to get my photos, and I had to wait a long time, so an employee gave them to me for $10.00 apiece. I intend to keep them, even though I bought them in a hurry.

I told everyone about the life jacket miracles, and I told them how God had changed my dad toward the end. I gave them as much of his testimony as I thought they would tolerate. I’m satisfied. It was a precious opportunity to share important knowledge. I suppose most of the people I talked to won’t be changed, but a few may. I’m not responsible for the way people take the things I say, but I do have an obligation to say them.

Beside the grave, I reminded everyone that God is very real, and that he is there for everyone. I tried to make them understand how important it was to get to know him. I probably offered to help; I don’t recall. I would say the whole thing lasted 6 or 7 minutes.

There were two attendees I didn’t expect to see. They’re my second cousins. One was a judge, and the other works for the courts. I’ll call them George and Ruth. Their mother was a remarkable lady. It seemed like there was nothing she couldn’t do. My grandfather was a circuit judge, and she was his right arm for years. He would have been lost without her. My mother and father took her with them on a trip to Europe, along with my Aunt Jean. I suppose their branch of the family was the closest to ours.

They couldn’t have been nicer to me, not that I should have been surprised. That’s the kind of people they are. I expected my dad’s passing to be ignored by nearly everyone, but my cousins brought food for everyone, and I’ll tell you something else they did. It may be a private matter, but I don’t care. George gave me a card, and inside the card was a check for $100.00 for burial expenses. I couldn’t believe it. I do not need the money, and I didn’t even know, or send anything, when his mother died.

I got to talk to George about God before I left. We were all sitting in the kitchen at the funeral home, eating the food he and Ruth had brought, and I tried to give him as much information as I could in a short time. I learned that he hadn’t been taught a lot about God, so I tried to steer him away from some traps. I have been praying for him. I hope for the best.

I have learned some disappointing things about other members of my family. Apparently, they worked against George when he ran for re-election. After all his mother did for my grandfather, that was disgraceful. I had heard something about it in the past, but because of my familiarity with the rumor mill and its reliability, I hadn’t been convinced, but since then I have heard more. Now I know the stories are true, and so, I suppose, does everyone in three counties.

It was magnanimous of Ruth and George to even show up this weekend, but to treat us as well as they did, well, that’s going above and beyond. They didn’t say, “Your family hurt us, but we’re here anyway.” They didn’t bring the election up.

They had a sister named Debbie. Her life ended very poorly. When she was young, she was pretty and charming, and as far as I knew, everyone loved her. Later on, she married a selfish man, and he took her daughter away when they divorced. After that, her mental state declined, and she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was never able to get it together, and she eventually died from lung cancer.

I always felt bad for her, and although I didn’t say much at the time, I prayed for her. I thought she was a wonderful person, and life was very cruel to her.

I should have been more involved with my relatives when I was young. I was too introverted. Also, because I grew up with so much abuse, I had a natural tendency to feel that people weren’t interested in hearing from me. I didn’t think they hated me; just that I was not someone they thought about or missed. I had the feeling that if I had called them, they would have wondered why I was doing it.

Ruth invited me to the family reunion that’s coming on Labor Day, and I might actually go. My sister stole a bunch of family photos when my grandmother died, and I have been too lazy to sort and scan them and see if I should turn any of them over to other people. I thought that if I took them to a reunion, people might be able to figure out who was in the photos and where they were taken. I can do some of that myself, but some photos are mysteries to me.

Every time I get away from that town, I feel like my family and heritage are lost to me forever, so I quit thinking about them, but when I go back for funerals, it all comes back to life.

I gave Ruth my email address. She says she’s going to make me a copy of the family cookbook. I didn’t know it existed. I thought those recipes were gone forever.

Aunt Thelma claims she has my grandmother’s recipe for country ham. I sincerely hope she does, because no one could cure a ham like my grandmother and my great Uncle Charlie.

We all talked about Eastern Kentucky and its shortcomings. The simple truth is that it’s not a good place to live because too many of the people are backward. The area is crippled by intense racial prejudice, sexual sin, a deteriorating work ethic, and a perverse love of ignorance and drunkenness. I was surprised to hear Ruth agree with my assessment. She says she advises her grown children to make lives for themselves somewhere else.

I have an aunt who defends the area, but the obvious truth is that Eastern Kentucky is like a Christmas tree with very few lights working. When my mother was a kid, the region was so backward the rest of America sent missionaries there, and for decades, bright people have been moving elsewhere. The endless flight of the best minds has taken a heavy toll.

Regarding the brain drain, Harry Caudill, author of the book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, said everyone who had any get-up-and-go got up and went. I don’t know how original that thought was, but he was correct. My second cousin Byrd was a circuit judge, and he bemoaned his loneliness as an educated person. He said, “Just once, I’d like to use a three-syllable word.”

I heard an interesting story about bigotry while I was there. My grandfather died in the 1990’s, and a black woman showed up at his funeral. In the town where he died, this was a startling event. She was an attorney. She worked in Breathitt County, which was part of his circuit. Breathitt is a very dark place.

She said my grandfather had helped her with her career when she showed up in town. This is why she came to pay her respects. It must have been very scary for her to live in that area by herself, so I suppose she was touched when anyone reached out to her.

Some time after that, someone burned her house down. I assume she got the message and moved on.

I don’t think my grandfather was terribly advanced when it came to race relations, but he wasn’t an idiot.

There are smart people in Eastern Kentucky, and there are good Christians there. The problem is that they are few and their influence is small.

After the burial, I drove around with Thelma and Louise. We went by a 120-acre farm my family sold after my grandparents died. But for the dark cloud over the area, I wish I could buy it back and live there. It’s remote, and the back portion of it drops off in sheer cliffs overlooking the Red River Gorge. I can afford to buy it, but it won’t work. Not unless I can get used to hearing the N-word and dealing with people who don’t want to grow up. I have so many black friends, and I have two black godchildren…how would people treat me after they started visiting?

Here is the gate to the farm.

Here is a view of the farm in the distance. The grey barn is on the property. The barn to the left is not. My grandfather dropped a cow on me in that grey barn. Long story.

Right now, I live in the South. My nearest neighbors are from Alabama. Backward, right? No. The husband is a math major. The wife is in some medical field or other. Wonderful Christians. Kind people. You don’t have to be a fool to be from the South, and being from the South is no excuse.

On the way back, I took a couple of detours into Tennessee. I found myself driving through the Smokies. It was wonderful. It was so much like the Gorge. Mountain laurel everywhere. A babbling creek with pools and rapids. Trees I could actually identify. Here, as wonderful as the area is, everything is either a trash oak or a palm tree.

Most of the time, I was in a national park, but I wonder if there are similar areas where I can buy land. I wonder what the people are like. I’m told they’re not too trashy. Tennessee has its bad areas, but I don’t think it has ever been as disappointing as Eastern Kentucky. As you drive from Eastern Tennessee into Kentucky, everything starts to look less shabby and unkempt. It’s as if an invisible hand had shown up and shoved the buildings to make them stand straighter.

I’m too tired to write any more. I drove 500 miles today, which is 5/6 of my personal limit. I’ll get back to this tomorrow, in all likelihood. There isn’t that much more to tell.

I never got to see Rock City, if that’s what you’re hoping. I still have time, though.