A bit long, but another great story by a writer on agricultural life and times.?ÿ This story focuses on her in-laws, a typical farm family.?ÿ Enjoy.
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It??s daylight on a warm, fall Sunday afternoon. The Rapp family is in their church clothes huddled around a pile of fresh dirt peering down at a white on red Coleman water jug. ??Your Cheatin?? Heart? by Hank Williams is crooning out of a portable speaker from the top of a neighboring headstone and despite the fact that half the town is questioning if they??ve got some real brazen grave robbers, we??re all smiling.
How did we get here?
When we look back on 2020 and the global pandemic of COVID-19, I think one of the most demoralizing aspects of the disease won??t be the divisions it created in our country or the absolute acceptance by many of untrue information, or the shocking lack of toilet paper, it will be our inability to treat any deaths during that time, be it Covid related or not, with the tradition and respect our loved ones deserved.
It??s an age-old concept employed by enemies throughout history to cause emotional defeat preceding physical and geographical domination. Don??t give the enemy time to bury their dead.
And, in a time where we thought we had advanced past that particularly nasty hurdle, the tactic emerges again employed by an invisible assailant rather than a physical one.
I??m sure nearly everyone experienced this phenomenon in some way.
My grandmother passed in 2020, just days after her hundredth birthday, and while we had a perfectly nice, small, family-only service for her, the visual of seeing the longevity of her impact on this earth in the form of the personal bonds she made with friends, distant relatives and loved ones was very absent. Achingly so.
When my husband??s grandfather, my son??s namesake, passed, it had all the potential to be the same.
Jack (G.P. to us, because Grandpa didn??t sound cool enough to my husband and his brother) was a mountain of a man in impact, in faith, sometimes in opinion and always in love, all packed into a relatively small package. He had the steadiest hands in the Springfield Plumbers and Pipefitters Union and the steadiest marriage to Doris.
We had time with him, and that was the most precious gift of all. In the months he spent on hospice care, we gathered friends and family together several weekends a month to share meals and stories and countless hands of pinochle. In those times, we were able to hear memories that might have been lost to time otherwise and those were precious gifts.
(One of my favorites was told to me just the other day, about G.P. showing up to pay a courting call on Doris and getting wrangled in to attempting to break a Pinto colt by her dad, which resulted in his ultimate demise ?? being drug across the barnyard only to have the friction set a pack of matches in his pants pocket on fire. ??What??s wrong, Speedy?? Doris??s dad asked him, laughing. What a way to impress your father-in-law.)
But, I digress.
Even with all of that preparation, mental, emotional and physical, death has a way of catching us all unaware.
A family has never rallied together to plan an event as efficiently as the Rapp family, maybe ever.
Despite COVID-19 protocol dictating an outdoor event, we celebrated with photos, flowers and full military honors. While the funeral itself was a beautiful, well-attended affair, the family didn??t get the closeness we needed for closure.
Our tears were dried on Kleenexes and kerchiefs rather than on each other??s shoulder seams as they are meant to be. The physical distance of that day was hard, and even with the ceremony, we didn??t feel quite ready to go through with the burial of the urn and ashes.
Then, one day we got the call from Memaw. Today??s the day.
So, after our normal Sunday lunch, we piled into a couple of cars, aunts, uncles, cousins and all, and puttered on down to the local cemetery.
As I disembarked my seat, my husband pulled two shovels from the bed of the vehicle, one foldable, army surplus number that was last used for a little vacation gold panning and another wooden-handled square job possibly last used for mucking stalls in the barn these puppies were scavenged from.
??Hey, Raney, grab G.P., would you?? he hollered over his shoulder on his way out.
Confused, and abandoned alone in the vehicle (apparently not as alone as I thought) I start searching.
Amid bibles stuffed with Sunday bulletins and baby gear and other ranch items, I was stumped.
??Right there.? My husband told me in possibly the only time he could find something I couldn??t, and pointed to the white-on-red Coleman water jug under my elbow.
Needless to say I was skeptical about our loved one being in a container that looked like something I used to cart out to my dad in the hay field.
Apparently the containers made to protect urns in the ground are expensive and we Rapps are cheap.
I hefted the jug up and carried it gently to the gravesite, where I was passed by one of the great-grandkids yelling ??I just love cemeteries,? as she ran to make mud pies with the other kids in some freshly dug dirt.
They??ll remember that later in life and have some questions but it kept everybody occupied for a time.
Once we got our little clan set up, we had the least silent ceremony there ever was.
As my husband and his brother dug, none of us could stop the remarks from flowing.
??Why didn??t we do this by lantern light at night??
??We could have played ??Digging Up Bones? instead of Your Cheatin?? Heart.?
(If you??re asking yourself here why we could go willy nilly digging in a place of the dead, Memaw is on the cemetery board. You don??t know you need special cemetery privileges until you really need them.)
We laughed at the guys antics, at the neighbors craning their necks as they drove by to catch a glimpse of us digging up a grave with wimpy shovels.
We wept when we played ??Your Cheating Heart? which was played ironically for G.P. and Memaw to dance to at their vow renewal just a few weeks prior.
And when we dried up and laughed an hugged, with the lineage of Hank Williams Sr. and Jr. a hot topic of conversation. I finally felt at peace.
G.P. would have loved every second of it, and that??s what mattered. That??s what I??ll remember.
Good writer. A story worthy of Uncle Paden.
