Grandma's Funeral

Mom just called to say that her mother's funeral was such a sweet time and they are going over for a quick visit with Pam who just got home from the hospital. She's had some complications with the chemo.
The funeral was in the hills of Wva so I wasn't able to be there, but my mom had me write a reading:

Bea Mitchem, a woman who remembered dates, names and facts with the best of Jeopardy winners. A woman whose uneducated intellect was off the charts. A woman with a quick wit and an abundance of compassion. A mother of 7, a wife of 2, a Grandmother of 12 and a Great Grandmother of 11.

But if anyone tells you that Beatrice Kyle Butler Mitchem was easy, they would be wrong. Because you can’t be easy when at a young age your family transplants to a new country and when you single-handedly care for your mother when you are only 13 and she is dying of cancer. You can’t be easy when you rely on your own sweat and labor for your food. When you live in the coal mining towns during a depression and when you marry young. And it certainly isn’t easy when your husband comes home from work one day, covered with coal dust and leans over the front porch railings to earnestly ask you if something happens to him that you would keep your four children together while you are unemployed. And it’s not easy being so clairvoyant that you dream of fresh earth and the next day you get the call that someone has died; and it’s even more difficult when you realize one morning that the same dream is about your husband and you tell him you think something terrible is going to happen to him. And how hard would it be to sit on the sand of a public quarry having a family July 4th picnic and watch helplessly as your husband drowned. And then to keep those children together at all cost, to take in ironing and scrape money together for food, all the while doing it alone.

So is it any wonder this woman was a survivor? That there would be times in her life that the love in her hands was balanced with a fire in her veins? That underneath it all she loved, really loved in the purest fashion?

It’s clear that this woman taught her family how to survive. How to be an oak when the unpredictable winds of life blow. How to stay together even when it hurts. How to care for the needy. How to be hospitable.

She did something so right because these children she kept together and the blended family she raised with her second husband all love her through thick and thin and demonstrate the same compassion she did. And they will remember her for the strength she handed down.

So today, for the first time in her nearly 93 years, Bea Mitchem has it very very easy.

My cousins just called to tell me they made some edits, no telling what they said... Cherryl wrote a great memory too but I'll have to get her permission to "publish" it.

Coleman and I are having a good day - he's eating and we're working on his ammonia level so we just decided we need to count how many times he goes to the bathroom today...a ton. Spence is planting tomatoes with his grandparents and I'm juggling waiting on Coleman and TV production via the web.

I was telling someone yesterday that caring for him has reminded me so much of having an infant again. If you're a mom you know what I'm talking about - the way you get yourself up early as quietly as possible to get a shower and pick up clothes and do a load of laundry before he wakes. I really have been reminded how much we rely on each other and I'm just really happy he can tell me what he needs.