My first memories of death

The first week of February 1959 we received two long-distance phone calls: Grandpa Batt had died in the mission field in New England, and Uncle Wayne had died of cancer in Utah. In those days a long-distance call usually meant some­thing about that drastic had happened. To the day she died in 1982 my mother could never feel comfortable making a long-distance call just to chat casually with some­one.

Uncle Wayne was my dad's brother, who years earlier had lost his arm in a car accident. He had always been a con­venient object lesson for Mom when she'd tell us to keep our arms and heads inside a mov­ing car so we wouldn't lose them like Uncle Wayne had.

Apparently Wayne's death had been fairly sud­den. He was only thirty-nine years old and had learned just a few weeks earlier that he had cancer. By the time he died, he had lost a lot of weight and was a mere shadow of his former self.

When my own father died in 1988, his sister Donna told me a story about Wayne's death back in 1959 that I had never heard in the family before:

Donna's husband Dean dreamed one night that he saw a council being held in the spirit world. A number of people were present, including Wayne's parents (my grandparents, whom I had never known), and they were trying to decide which family member to call home. Alvin was the obvious choice because he had just had a stroke, and people were expecting him to die, but as the council deli­berated further, they felt that more good could be accomp­lished for the family here and more of them acti­vated in the Church if Wayne were called back. Such was the council's decision, and a week later Wayne found out he had cancer.

Donna also told me that at about the same time the dream oc­cur­red she or some­one in the family met some long-time friends of the family who inquired about Wayne.

"Why do you ask?" she wondered.

And they said, "We were working in the Logan Temple, and your parents visited us there and said that Wayne would be joining them soon." Her parents, my grandparents [Henry William Cleverly and Olive Ellen Ritchie], had been dead for four years and fourteen years respectively.

We drove to Utah for Wayne's funeral, and the following Sunday my dad, who himself was not always active during this period, took his brother Marvin to church. On Sunday, February 8, 1959, my mother recorded in her diary: "Ivard talked Marv into going to Priesthood, first time since he was a little kid, so he went at 8:45 & took him to Orchard [Ward]."

That simple act resulted in profound changes in Marvin and Lorraine's family, just as the family council in the spirit world had intended. By the follow­ing year Uncle Marv and Aunt Lorraine had returned to acti­vity and were sealed in the temple. Not only he but his entire family was rescued. Years later one of Marv and Lorraine's sons, Brent Cleverly, served as a stake president in Woods Cross. One of their daughters, Lee Ann Sargent, was married to a bishop who served in our stake in Bountiful. Who knows the end of good that came from the simple decision in an hour of mourning to invite someone back to church.

Uncle Alvin, who had suf­fered a stroke, lived for another twenty years or so. Aunt Stella also became active about this time.