My Grandma Alice lived in a little white house in Gaffney, South Carolina during my early childhood. She was in her 70s when I was born, so she was retired all the years I knew her.
Grandma was a tiny little woman. She might have been five foot tall if she stood on her tip-toes. She was thin and nicely wrinkled with dark brown hair that never turned grey.
Grandma loved me. I was her namesake.
Grandma was the mother of ten children. She outlived two of them. My father, who was her eldest, died of heart failure in 1962 less than four months shy of being 62 years old, and Samuel, her third child, died of pneumonia as a young child on the "mill hill" in Cherokee Falls, SC.
I admire my grandmother. She had a hard life raising all those children on a shoestring and losing two of them and her husband in her lifetime. I'm not sure I could have survived that life. Grandma was a very strong woman, a direct descendant of both French and Scottish nobility, who lived her life in poverty in the isolated hill country of the Carolinas.
I have many memories of my Grandma, both good and bad, as she was human, but the memory I want to share with you today happened in 1963 when Grandma was so very sick and living her last hours on this Earth.
They had called in the family. Grandma was released from the hospital so she could die at home. By the time we got there, she was in bed in her house and her fever was high. I was young, but I remember my aunts and uncles looking grave and saying, "Pneumonia," in hushed voices.
Grandma was talking in a croaking voice between weak coughs. She had a death rattle. I will never forget that sound. Not really something a child should hear coming from her grandmother, but there it was. Death. The aunts and uncles recognized the sound. Their faces white, their mouths clinched tight, trying to keep back the tears. Their mother was dying.
And she was talking.
Grandma was suddenly young and happy and being courted by my dashingly handsome, Grandpa William, who passed in 1934 at age 56 of kidney failure, so long before I was born. She was getting ready for a date with him and telling her Mama she could hear William's carriage coming down the road. She was trying to hurry. "How do I look?" she asked, wanting to look her best for her beau.
I asked Mama why Grandma said carriage instead of car. Mama explained to me that back in the late 1800s when Grandma was young and dating Grandpa, there were no cars. They only had horses and carriages.
Grandma relived many years of her life while lying in that bed those final long hours. She talked to friends and relatives long since dead. They gathered round her bed thick as thieves. She would laugh, which sent her into fits of coughing, but she was happy to see them. She talked to Daddy too, which made Mama cry.
In the end, William came in his carriage and she went peacefully and happily to join him. The body she left behind was merely a shell...a decaying cocoon. Her soul was free.
Grandma's body lies beside her beloved William in the Hopewell Baptist Church graveyard in Blacksburg, South Carolina. I find it comforting to know they are together. She loved him so....
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