A major winter storm hit the Mountain West the day we left Utah to drive to Idaho Falls for Grandpa Batt's funeral. We had been in Utah attending the funeral for my dad's brother Wayne, who had died the same week as Grandpa. The driving was treacherous, and in the blizzard we slid off the road and got stuck near the county line between Weber and Box Elder counties.
Grandpa's funeral was a full ten days after his death. He and Grandma had been serving a mission in New England. I don't specifically remember their mission call, but I would have been only seven then. Their mission president had asked them to extend their mission for a couple more months. They had just sent him the letter saying yes, they'd stay, they would be happy to serve an extra two months.
The Lord had other plans, however, and on the morning of the day they originally would have been released, Grandpa passed away quietly in his sleep. No pain. No sickness. His mission was up, and he was transferred to the other side. What a way to go, I thought, serving the Master he must have known and loved so well.
According to the revelations, Grandpa was transferred instead to labor in the spirit world. "I beheld," wrote President Joseph F. Smith in his vision of the redemption of the dead, "that the faithful elders of this dispensation, when they depart from mortal life, continue their labors in the preaching of the gospel of repentance and redemption, through the sacrifice of the Only Begotten Son of God, among those who are in darkness and under the bondage of sin in the great world of the spirits of the dead" (D&C 138:57).
Grandma was left alone in a strange part of the country, and her son Bill had to get back to New England and make arrangements and get her and the body back to Idaho—and all that took time. It must have been a long, lonely trip for Grandma from Rutland, Vermont, back to Ucon, Idaho.
The funeral was in Ucon in the ward from which they had left to go on their mission. One of Grandpa's favorite hymns (and since then one of my favorites) was sung that day:
Israel, Israel, God is calling,
Calling thee from lands of woe.
Babylon the great is falling;
God shall all her tow’rs o’erthrow.
Come to Zion, come to Zion
Ere his floods of anger flow.
Come to Zion, come to Zion
Ere his floods of anger flow.
Israel, Israel, God is speaking.
Hear your great Deliv'rer's voice!
Now a glorious morn is breaking
For the people of his choice.
Come to Zion, come to Zion,
And within her walls rejoice.
Come to Zion, come to Zion,
And within her walls rejoice.
Israel, angels are descending
From celestial worlds on high,
And to man their pow’r extending,
That the Saints may homeward fly.
Come to Zion, come to Zion,
For your coming Lord is nigh.
Come to Zion, come to Zion,
For your coming Lord is nigh.
Israel! Israel! Canst thou linger
Still in error’s gloomy ways?
Mark how judgment's pointing finger
Justifies no vain delays.
Come to Zion, come to Zion!
Zion’s walls shall ring with praise.
Come to Zion, come to Zion!
Zion’s walls shall ring with praise.
It was a cold, grey day at the Ucon Cemetery. The finality of it all finally hit me as I watched the casket being lowered into that dark hole in the frozen ground, and I began to cry.
I loved my grandparents. We used to visit them in their farm home in eastern Idaho before their mission. The picture that comes hazily to mind is like a Currier and Ives winter scene, where inside a warm old farmhouse there was plenty of love, the kind little boys thrive on. I'm sure we went there other than during the winter, but that's what I remember: snow over everything, the fields and roads, the mailboxes and fence posts, the houses and barns, with windows steamed and icy from cooking in the old big kitchen.
Showing posts with label Deaths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Deaths. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Party line
I don't know if we always had a telephone when I was little. We did some of the time because my father worked for the railroad, and they had to be able to reach him, and he had to be able to reach them.
The earliest telephone I remember was one of the old boxes that hung on the wall. It had a handle on the side that we cranked to get the operator. She would connect us to the party we wanted, unless she happened to know they had gone to town or some such place and would tell us so. Telephone numbers in our rural exchange were only three or four digits, and I don't think we actually referred to numbers but to the names of people we wanted the operator to connect us to.
We were on a party line with a number of other families, and if any of them were on the line, we had to wait until they were through before we could place or receive a call. If we wanted to be snoopy or catch up on the latest neighborhood gossip, we could quietly listen in, hopefully without the other parties knowing we were there. If our call were urgent enough, we could speak up and ask them to get off the line so we could place a call.
Each party on the line had a distinctive ring. We had to tell by the ring whether an incoming call was for us or one of the neighbors. A long and two short rings might be ours, while two longs might be the neighbors a quarter of a mile up the lane. And so on.
Occasionally, strangers would knock on our door during the night or early morning hours to see if we had a telephone they could use. Their cars were traveling too fast to negotiate the sharp curve right by our house, and they would invariably end up in the drain ditch just beyond.
Long-distance telephone calls were almost unthinkable. And they were never dialed directly. They had to be placed through an operator. They usually came when someone had died.
We got two such calls in the same week in early 1959. On February 2 my Aunt Stella called from Utah to say that Uncle Wayne, my dad's younger brother, had died from an operation he had had two weeks earlier. On February 4 my Uncle Bill called from Washington to say that Grandpa Batt, my mother's father, had died in his sleep in the mission field in Vermont. Both deaths were entirely unexpected and set in motion a 17-day family trip, first to northern Utah for Uncle Wayne's funeral and then to eastern Idaho for Grandpa's funeral.
Less than a month later, after we had attended those two funerals, our family moved from Oregon to Idaho. On our new farm south of Nampa we actually had a telephone with a rotary dial and a five-digit telephone number. But we were still on a party line.
The earliest telephone I remember was one of the old boxes that hung on the wall. It had a handle on the side that we cranked to get the operator. She would connect us to the party we wanted, unless she happened to know they had gone to town or some such place and would tell us so. Telephone numbers in our rural exchange were only three or four digits, and I don't think we actually referred to numbers but to the names of people we wanted the operator to connect us to.
We were on a party line with a number of other families, and if any of them were on the line, we had to wait until they were through before we could place or receive a call. If we wanted to be snoopy or catch up on the latest neighborhood gossip, we could quietly listen in, hopefully without the other parties knowing we were there. If our call were urgent enough, we could speak up and ask them to get off the line so we could place a call.
Each party on the line had a distinctive ring. We had to tell by the ring whether an incoming call was for us or one of the neighbors. A long and two short rings might be ours, while two longs might be the neighbors a quarter of a mile up the lane. And so on.
Occasionally, strangers would knock on our door during the night or early morning hours to see if we had a telephone they could use. Their cars were traveling too fast to negotiate the sharp curve right by our house, and they would invariably end up in the drain ditch just beyond.
Long-distance telephone calls were almost unthinkable. And they were never dialed directly. They had to be placed through an operator. They usually came when someone had died.
We got two such calls in the same week in early 1959. On February 2 my Aunt Stella called from Utah to say that Uncle Wayne, my dad's younger brother, had died from an operation he had had two weeks earlier. On February 4 my Uncle Bill called from Washington to say that Grandpa Batt, my mother's father, had died in his sleep in the mission field in Vermont. Both deaths were entirely unexpected and set in motion a 17-day family trip, first to northern Utah for Uncle Wayne's funeral and then to eastern Idaho for Grandpa's funeral.
Less than a month later, after we had attended those two funerals, our family moved from Oregon to Idaho. On our new farm south of Nampa we actually had a telephone with a rotary dial and a five-digit telephone number. But we were still on a party line.
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