The Passing of My Mother 1

My mother passed this morning at some time in the 4am hour. She had contracted COVID about two weeks ago. A week ago Wednesday she went to the hospital with pneumonia and sat in the waiting room of the ER for four hours, only to be sent home. My family members urged the doctor to give her something. He may have given amoxicillin. It's easy to speculate that things might have gone differently if they had treated her more seriously, admitted her, and perhaps given better medication. 24hrs makes a big difference.

She was admitted the next day. I went down. She was improving. We were talking about rehabilitation and long-term care. I came back home on Wednesday. Yesterday she became much weaker. There were new infiltrates in her lungs. She was giving signs that she was ready to go, a gentile "stop" to attempts to feed her. Then she passed this morning. She was 98.

2. My mother was born in May of 1926 in Greenfield, Indiana. Her father was a Pilgrim Holiness Church minister, Harry Shepherd, pastoring Brown's Chapel at that time. The denomination had only officially organized four years earlier as a collection of smaller groups. Her mother and father were from Sullivan, Indiana. Both traced their roots back to the earliest days of Indiana.

She was the oldest child to survive. In 1925, her parents had lost a child, Dorothy. Mom would go on to have brothers Paul and David as well as a younger sister Bernadine. As a very poor family, they were all very close. For a while, my uncle Paul and his wife Betty even moved around Indianapolis wherever my parents moved. Mom and Paul were very close. 

When I first arrived in Florida a week ago, mom spoke of some regret that Bernadine spent her last days somewhat alone in a nursing home. She spoke positively of the birth of a new great-grandson to Bernadine. She expressed some regret about her mother dying somewhat alone in a nursing home. I don't know if these were prescient comments, although they didn't seem so at the time.

3. Pilgrim pastors had a one-year call and seemed to move around quite a bit. Her father moved to pastor in Greenwood when she was three months old.

Then Frankfort Pilgrim College was founded in 1927. My grandfather had graduated from Wabash College in 1907 and so was one of few people at that time who had a college degree from a liberal arts college. It was so late in the summer when they asked him that they initially lived in the boy's dorm, and my uncle Paul was born there in 1927.

They lived in someone else's cottage (one room) on the grounds of the college and had to vacate it during camp meetings. They got permission from the owner to winterize it and add a small room for beds with mattresses made out of straw. Makes me think of the "room" that Luke 2:7 likely referred to (rather than "inn," as it has often been translated). My mother's brother David was born in this cottage in 1930. Bernadine was born right before camp meeting in 1932.

My mother once said that they grew up so poor that they didn't really know any difference during the Great Depression. They ate whatever the students ate, which as things got worse was often a watery soup. Dandelion greens from the fields.

4. As the Depression went into full swing, Frankfort had to close for seven years (1932-39). These years left strong impressions on my mother's memory as a girl growing from 6-11 years old. Their family adventures were like Odysseus leaving his home and then trying to find his way back after the Trojan War. 

The odyssey started with an invitation from a former president of Southern Wesleyan University (Wachtel) to come start a Bible college in North Carolina at Kernersville. He thought he might be able to pay my grandfather something. He was wrong, of course. The school only lasted a semester, the spring of 1933. The school that stuck there would only get off the ground in 1946. 

Somehow, they had a twenty-year-old Maxwell (almost certainly not as shiny as the one pictured here). It had a front windshield but no windows. They put up curtains for windows. A friend helped them buy a hitch so they could bring their stuff in tow.

My grandfather once said he would never drive over 30 miles per hour in his life. It must have been incredibly slowgoing, following the path of I-75 down into Kentucky and Tennesee before there were interstates. At times, apparently, it wasn't entirely clear which way the road actually went.

My grandmother had a block of wood in case the car would start to roll backward. My mom remembered one occasion when her mother quickly handed her baby Bernadine and jumped out to put the wood in place. They slept in the car, my grandfather feeling the need to take the whole front seat. My grandmother slept sitting up holding Bernadine. Then my mom and the boys slept on the floorboards and the remaining backseat.

About fifty miles from Knoxville, they pulled over at an unpainted house and asked to park in the family’s yard. The family urged them to come inside and sleep on the floor instead. Rattlesnakes. They woke to the smell of breakfast—mustard greens and tough bacon rind. My mother snuck the food to her mother to eat because my mother didn’t want to eat it. Grandma was good like that.

Because of a problem with the hitch, they spent a little extra time in Knoxville with friends. My mother had been given a pretty red coat back in Frankfort, the prettiest coat she had ever had. After they resumed their journey, they realized it had been left behind. A sad day for a six-year-old girl.

5. So they spent the spring of 1933 in Kernersville, North Carolina, probably some 15 miles from where my grandfather's grandfather had been born in 1808. This was the worst point of the Depression with over 25% unemployment. It was the year FDR took office. It was the year Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

My mother remembered oatmeal for breakfast and snapping turtle soup in the two-story brick building in Kernersville where they tried to start the college. They apparently took the snapping turtles from the grounds, and my mother was warned to watch the heads, since they might still snap even though detached. My grandmother used broth from the oatmeal to feed my aunt Bernadine, who was so frail, my mother's mother was afraid she would not survive the winter.

My grandfather preached on the side to make a little extra, as he always did. I'm not sure if he was doing prophecy teaching yet, but this would become a significant part of his ministry.

To be continued...