"Morning Obituaries"

     My acquaintance with Leontyne was limited to a few brief conversations when I was a visitor in the home where she had lived prior to her death for eleven years with her daughter Janet and son-in-law Dave who were parishioners of mine. She was ninety-four years old when she died on June 28, 1994. I didn’t have much personal knowledge of her life. However, I did have knowledge of the area where she was born and lived for the first fifty years of her long life. That place is the farm country to the west of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The people and the area are not dissimilar to the place where I was raised. Therefore, I offer this reflection on life and death in upper Midwestern rural America, particularly the Dakotas. Those who have spent any time at all in small town America will know that what I relate is true.  

            I first read the following story in a Louisiana newspaper in the early

           1990’s. I was at Fort Polk with my Army Reserve unit doing Annual

           Training. Somebody had a newspaper which I borrowed. It    

           contained a column by a staff writer talking about the death of her

           father. I liked the story and her writing very much. Over the years, I

          have lost the column and her name. My apologies to her! She

          deserves the credit for these insightful observations. The parable is

          too good not to be shared.

Morning Obituaries

 

            Radios sounded scratchier then, like the voices were being pushed through a screen. His was a Philco, the portable kind that stayed tuned to the same station forever. It sat on a high shelf in the kitchen and breakfast was the only time it played.

            To start his day, the old man listened to the local obituaries, which a faceless woman with a country accent read in a solemn voice. Organ music introduced the program.

            The list of the dead seemed interminable. Nobody talked in his kitchen while the lady read.

            “Burial will be at Hillside Cemetery. . .”

            “Visitation will be from 3 to 9 at the Everson Funeral Home. . .”

            “Mr. Olafson leaves four sons, one daughter, twelve grandchildren.”

            The death lady never got in a hurry, would occasionally mispronounce a name and reread it several times.

            Oral obituaries! We imagine her sitting there shuffling the papers from the funeral home, adjusting her glasses, taking pride in providing a community service. Perhaps she was the undertaker’s wife or simple a church lady doing her perceived duty.

            While he listened to the death roll, the old man would stare out the window and eat his breakfast of cold cereal, hot coffee, sausage and eggs.

            He knew the dead the lady listed, everything about them and their families. He made no comment, accepting their deaths as part of the daily routine. When he would decide to attend a funeral, he would get out his black suit and white shirt, worn only on these occasions and stiffly trudge off to church.

            To an outside observer, it would seem that the deaths of family and friends seemed almost matter-of-fact to the old man. People were born, people died and in between they did the best they could. Perhaps it had to do with living through two world wars or the Depression or a time when a shorter life expectancy was the rule.

            There is a certain fatalistic outlook shared by most older farmers, a perspective in which nature is boss. Perhaps it’s the whole business of seasons which is rendered so poetically by Ecclesiastes:

            “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. . .”

            Death was simply another cold fact of life, like drought or flood or crop disease. It was something to be got through, like a disappointing yield. The old man never talked about death, in the abstract anyway. Rural folk weren’t prone to being philosophical. For him it was always specific, as in “Did you hear that Wilma Hummel died?” One wonders how, in his own mind, he had come to make its acceptance easier? Yes, we do wonder.

A morning obituary: Leontine M. Jones. Born October 4, 1900, in Freeman, South Dakota; died June 28, 1994, in Florissant, Missouri. She was preceded in death by her husband Richard E. Jones. She leaves two children, four grandchildren, three great grandchildren. A memorial service will be held on Friday, July 1, at 10:30 am at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. The Rev. Richard B. Tudor will officiate.

            And he will comment on the fact that she was baptized and confirmed in a German Lutheran Church in her home town of Freeman. It was a church steadfast in the Reformed tradition where certainly she was taught about the centrality of scripture in the religious life and a church where she learned just what it is that makes up a Christian life. It is to confess Jesus Christ, that in Him God has been active to restore and reconcile the human race and through that restoration, the whole creation.

            I was told by her daughter Janet that in her later life Leontine did not place much stock in dwelling on the past. I hope that she will forgive me these few moments of nostalgia, a remembering of a time and a sometimes harsh place settled and populated by a tough, resolute group of northern European people who left behind them a solid heritage of hard work, simple values, and steadfast faith.