IN A COUNTRY CEMETERY

I was up early on the morning of 30 November as usual, preparing for my two-mile run down Windsor Drive. Checking on Mother Pitts as I always did, I found her halfway out of bed, as if she had tried to get up, and she was having another of her hard-breathing attacks. Ouida and I transferred her to her lift chair, giving little thought to her breathing problem since she frequently had them and always rallied once we changed her position. But this time she did not rally. Her granddaughter who is a nurse and who was visiting with us for Thanksgiving came in a few hours later and told us Mother Pitts was dying.

But Ouida and I had seen this before and we could not believe that she was dying. Once when she was that way we called her doctor, and he thought she was dying. That was 18 months ago! And sure enough she appeared to rally this time as the day progressed. But at 9:30 that night while I was in bed reading Ouida came to me and told me that Mother Pitts had quit breathing. I hurried to her side and sure enough she was gone. We gathered around her bed and thanked God for the beautiful life she had lived.

She chose a good time for her home going, for every Thanksgiving her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren gather at our home so they can be with her as well as each other. Their visit over, they were preparing to leave, but when her condition grew critical, they stayed awhile longer and were with her when she died. The funeral director observed that it is rare these days for an aged person to die with three generations gathered around her bed. More often than not, he noted, they die alone in a hospital or a nursing home.

Already aware of the procedure to follow, we summoned her doctor, who is also a dear friend and a Christian brother, who pronounced her dead and reported the death to the county coroner. Then we called the funeral director with whom Ouida had already made arrangements. He came personally, along with his son who shares the business, and was very solicitous and sensitive to Ouida and her kin.

The body, well covered and secured to the stretcher, was born out into the dark night. As Ouida and I stood at the open door watching, the funeral director called back to us reassuringly, “We’ll take good care of her.” Mother Pitts was gone. While we knew it had to came and needed to come, it seemed unreal after almost ten years.

We were all in our places in church the next morning. It was announced that Ouida’s mother had died during the night and that there would be only a graveside service at the old family cemetery near Athens, Texas on Monday. No one in Denton would be expected to be present since they did not know her. I already had the obituary prepared for the local paper. Word was sent to her old church in Athens so that her few surviving friends could attend the graveside service. She outlived most of her friends and kin. She was 95.

On Monday fifteen of us in four cars drove along together to Athens 120 miles southeast of Denton to the Willow Springs Cemetery, where we gathered with about that many more of her old friends and kin. Ouida and I were at this quiet country cemetery the year we married for her father’s funeral. Mr. Pitts had been waiting 47 years for his wife to be buried beside him!

It was a simple service that was cut even shorter than planned due to the cold. We were huddled in a tent erected for us by an Athens funeral home. One of the grandsons, now a father of two, gave the eulogy, which he made a joyous occasion. He told how the night before they had all gathered around the diningroom table at Aunt Ouida’s house and reminisced about grandmother, including fun things, and how they had done a lot of laughing, which he thought was appropriate. He told how Aunt Ouida once got in trouble with a visiting Church of Christ preacher. Ouida, then a teenager who wanted to be with a visiting cousin more than prepare for a visiting preacher, told anyone who was willing to listen that she wished that preacher wasn’t coming.

Her little brother, who grew up to be a captain in the Navy, heard what she said and found occasion to make appropriate use of it once the preacher was on the premises for Sunday dinner. “Brother Metcalf, you know what Ouida said about you, she said she wished you weren’t coming for dinner.” Ouida’s younger sister, always ready to come to Ouida’s defense, spoke up and said, “Brother Metcalf, Ouida didn’t say that, Mother did!” That filled the funeral tent with heany laughter, which somehow seemed in order.

I said only a few words at the end, to the effect that Mother Pitts had had an adventurous life. Childhood and school were adventures, as were being a wife and a mother, but in death she had embarked upon life’s greatest adventure. And it was a joyous adventure in that she was not leaving home but going home, and that death is not the end of life but its beginning.

There were some special moments during Mother Pitts’ last hours. On the day before she died her grandson Mike Wrinkle, who spoke at graveside, and I sat down beside her and thanked her for being a blessing to us through the years. Mike recalled his boyhood days when she regaled him and his sisters with stories and set an example for them in old-fashioned values that will always influence his life for good. Mother Pitts was responsive enough to thank him for his kind words. She may not have been as aware when, on the day she died, Ouida, her sister, and two granddaughters gathered about her bed and took turns thanking God for her long, exemplary life. They praised God for the beautiful life she had lived and that she was able to be a blessing to them and so many others.

It was such scenes as this that led Scotland’s beloved poet Robert Bums to write:

“From scenes like these old Scotia’s grandeur springs,

That makes her loved at home, revered abroad.”

Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,

“An honest man’s the noblest work of God:”

And certes, in fair virtue’s heavenly road,

The cottage leaves the palace far behind;

It was when Ouida stood before the open casket and saw her mother for the last time that I witnessed one of the most moving scenes of my entire life. She reached out her hand and placed it on her mother’s folded hands and said, “Goodbye, mother dear, we love you.” It was not sad and there were no tears, but it was a magnificent moment of human drama that will forever be etched in my memory.

In that moment in a country graveyard beauty and goodness met in simple splendor. Ouida held the hands of the one who bore her and gave her life. Mother Pitts had told me how she had to nurture Ouida through years of childhood frailty. I thought of that as we stood there together and of how the roles were finally reversed, with Ouida caring for her in her old age, not unlike the way one would care for a baby, year after year.

In that meeting of folded hands, mother and daughter together who had invested so much of themselves in each other, I saw sheer human goodness. Unalloyed, undiminished goodness! If Calvin had seen what I saw in that moment he could have talked of human goodness rather than human depravity. Ah, if I were a poet I might capture its elegance in words! Or perhaps in parable. It seemed to say to me that this is what the kingdom of heaven is like.

To use my old metaphor once more, we no longer have to wait on the platform for the train to come for Mother Pitts. We often heard the train in the distance and prepared for her home going, but it would never stop for her. But the other night it pulled in, almost unexpectedly, and beckoned her aboard. We watched as it disappeared into God’s tomorrow. She is free at last!—the Editor