My Old Kentucky Home -- and My Old Rhode Island Home, et al.

It was inevitable. It had to happen.

I got interested in genealogy.  No, I don't care about YOURS, and no, I don't even want to hear my brother talk about OURS. I have found there is little else more eye-glazingly, brain-numblingly agonizing than hearing someone else talk about their relatives.

How do I know such things?  My late mother-in-law did lots of genealogy for her and her husband's family. We have records of her work, and I accompanied her on a few British genealogy projects, including the one where she used the name of a dead ancestor to get into the British Museum to see records there. But I didn't want to hear much of it unless I had a glass or two of wine. Or more.

Also, one of my brothers has been digging up dead people, so to speak, for quite a few years, and used to spam me with all kinds of family documents, photos, and other detritus of the dead.

The documents did have their allure from time to time, as did the page from the Rhode Island Registry of Births, Deaths, and Other Big Doings that he sent me one time. I actually took time to peruse the page and made an exciting discovery: Mixed in there among various male grandparents , I found the name of one of their sons, my dead great uncle.  Just by reading that page, I found out that my paternal grandfather had had a baby brother who died within a day or so of birth. None of us knew that.

Now, THAT meant more to me that all the Mayflower folderol, honestly.  And let me tell you, I do have plenty of Mayflower folderol, on both sides, and I still gotta pay for Starbucks.

Still, despite the discovery of this sad little chapter in my great-grandmother's life, my response to dead relative spam was usually a comment along the lines of "Mom's still alive, and that is about all the ancestors I can manage right now.  I have to worry about the ones that are living, so the dead ones don't matter all that much."  I ticked my brother off more than once, I am sure.  :-)

Things changed, though, on Labor Day weekend, when I went once again to our local Scottish Games, and as before, I was exhilirated, whoo-hooing wound up, about the massed bands of bagpipers, 600 in all. I thought there must be some genetic reason for that over-the-top response, and I asked my brother if he'd traced a particular strand of relatives back to Scotland yet.

The short answer, No, took about 10 minutes to get to, once he started reciting all the begats, but no, he didn't cross back over the pond yet. But somewhere in that conversation, he told me about the website FindAGrave to check out one relative.

That was about 2 weeks ago, and I have been on that darn site every day, a-postin' pictures and a-writin' comments and a-settin' up new memorials.

Can you tell much of my time has been spent with ancestors' graves in Kentucky?

Well, I imagine that has come from my mom's recent death. She was born there, and I have missed her more than I thought I would -- not the poor, ill old woman she became but the woman I grew up with and heard but didn't listen to, so much -- or so I thought.

But I had been listening, and I could tell my brother about other relatives he had never heard of, and I created memorials to them.  By carefully reading existing memorial pages, I found headstones for relatives I had heard about and got them linked up to each other.

I have seen the headstones for great-grandmothers I never had the chance to meet. Thanks to google, I can zero in on the cemetery in the Kentucky countryside where my mother's mother's mother is buried, and when I do that, tears well up in my eyes.  I don't know why, but it happens every time.  And they are not sad tears, or not exactly. I have a picture of her, but seeing where she ended up makes her even more real and makes me feel very connected to her.  That is my mother's grandmother. Those more immediate relationships really bring it home.

They brought me home, in a way.

It struck me that although I had the chance to sit with my father's maternal grandmother while she worked on quilts -- one of which I still have over 30 years later as a wedding gift, completed after her death -- I never met my dad's grandmother, who died the year before I was born, but with whom I share my birth day.

I am just as much Gertrude in Kentucky as I am Harriett in Texas, as much Ethel from Rhode Island as Emmeline in Kentucky.  One I knew, three I missed.

(But thanks, Mom and Dad, for not naming me after any of them!)

So, I have been diligently working on making the connections there on FindAGrave, which has helped me make the connections in my own mind and has helped make my mother's side of me more real for me than it ever was.

And I have found other benefits.  I have found relatives in KIN-tucky that share my new interest, and that's a nice bond. I will have live people to visit when I make my journey to pay my respects to the dead ones scatted throughout south central Kentucky.

I have learned that one family name is all over the state of Rhode Island, as is another one, and so besides the ancestral region of south central Kentucky, where my mom's people are pretty well interweaved, I also belong very much to Rhode Island. I have never set foot there, but I am a-fixin' to remedy that omission.

Perhaps my most gratifying 'mission' was finding the grave of my late mother in law's baby sister. Janice Mary died around age 2 and was buried in Illinois, and then her parents and her sister (my mom in law) moved to California, where all 3 are buried. I found Janice's grave, which had been listed by someone in IL, requested a photo of her headstone, and linked Janice with her family  who ended up in California. It might never to matter to anyone else, but I know without doubt that Libby, my mother in law, would have appreciated the effort.

I wrote somewhere shortly after starting this that I am more firmly grounded, with no pun intended, but there is something that has been very settling for me in finding where I came from, that I actually belong to a whole long line of someones.

And I look forward to learning more about them, with such information as there is, as I work my way back. If all that entails is standing in a cemetery where they are buried with each other, at least I will be in their place and that may be enough.

Goodbye to Mom

I've been away from the blog for a long time, mainly because, like many other bloggers, I just ran out of steam, or ideas, or something, I thought. I used to be all fired up about writing here and really enjoyed sharing ideas and reflections. And then I just stopped back in August.

I hadn't realized I'd been away for so long, but then when I see August was the last date, I realize why: that was the last time I visited my mom where things were pretty much the same as usual.  I didn't go back up there for a couple of months, but when I did, her decline had started in earnest, and my monthly trips to the Portland area apparently took all the mental energy I had left.

That, and the weather.  GAH.

After those monthly visits to check on a health condition that wasn't improving for my mom, and after making some very tough healthcare decisions for her, I got a call in mid-February that she was not responsive. I flew up the next day, expecting to say goodbye to her very soon.

When I got there, she was out of it, but by golly if she didn't rally for a few days when she knew I was there.  On the last day of her life, I spent all morning with her, making sure she had adequate pain medication.

"We give it to her when she asks for it," staff told me.

"But," I replied, "if you don't go in there to hear her crying out, how do you know she NEEDS it and is asking for it?"

["Terms of Endearment" kept going through my head, and I thought to myself, "I'm fixin' to go all Shirley MacLaine on y'all if you don't get going here." But then, they probably wouldn't have known what I was walking about.]

"What ELSE you got for her pain?"

Mom was finally not feeling any pain and even got some appetite back. In fact, she ate a great breakfast and was her usual coffee connoisseur self, complaining, "This coffee's no good.  It's COLD."  (Ha, the thickener didn't bother her but the temperature did!)  The microwave fixed the sludge-thick coffee and she finished the whole darn 12 oz cup.

A little later in the morning she repeatedly said, "Come up! Come up!"  Over and over.  I asked her who was telling her to come up, but she didn't reply, just repeated, "Come up! Come up!"  Hmmmm.

Around 11 am I left her so that she could have her dressings changed and so that she and I could both get some rest. That was the last time I saw her awake.

I came back around 3 pm and she was zonked out.  Staff said she had been 'non-responsive' again. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I said I'd come back later. I got a call around 6:30 that her breathing had changed, so I went back to the nursing facility and spent the next 5 hours with her, watching my mom's life come to a slow and peaceful close.

I imagine she was in labor with me for longer than I was watched her go, so I figure I owed her.
And I wanted to be there.

When I got there and saw her, I knew she was all but gone. Her breathing was pretty much on auto-pilot at that point.  I sat beside her and held her hand; I leaned across her and held her; I leaned behind the head of her bed, over to her best ear, and talked to her and told her all the things I wanted to tell her, things I hoped she wanted to hear.

From time to time I heard her breathing 'downshift,' so I knew the change was coming.  I continued to hold her hand, as I always did, hoping she'd know from that gesture that it was me, the bringer of coffee and new clothes.

Finally, I didn't see or hear her breathe. She was still.  I watched her for a few moments and then called the nurse, Desirae.  She checked her and said Mom was still there. I held Mom and spoke some more.

Very soon, a final check with the stethoscope told me my mother had died.  It was immediately evident.  Her pretty  ivory complexion with faint pink roses on her cheekbones was no longer there.

That was February 21, just before midnight.

When I came home from that trip that Friday, I had my mom's cremated remains with me as carryon luggage.  THAT was an experience. Two trips before I'd come back with a puppy in a doggie carrier, and now this, ashes in a cardboard scattering tube with an ocean scene printed on it.

I had had the discussion with the undertaker about putting those ashes into a great big red Folger's container, but we agreed that would have been too tacky.

However, it would have been Mom.  And hey, it wasn't my idea anyway; those "Bucket List" guys did it.

Oddball thought. Laughing, crying, feeling in a fog for a few days.

What does this have to do with accidental retirement? Not much, really, except that I am more grateful than I can express that I wasn't tied down to some damn  job where I had to scrape and beg for time off.  I have had the time the past couple of years actually to slow way down, and that very slowing down gave me precious time with my mom that I'd never had before.

That's all for now. I may be back.