A Match, A Fuse, and Dynamite

I know this blog seems stuck on a single subject, of late, but I plead a need to keep processing, thereby getting ready to move on to other subjects.

Another overwhelming impression I have from my mother's funeral is that an amazing number of people will drop whatever their busy lives involve to attend the funeral of someone whom they knew and loved or were related to or who was related to or loved by someone they know.  Others who are unable to attend will go to great lengths to show how much they care.  This outpouring of caring is not easy to understand but is so easy to be thankful for.

I'm going to attempt to list here some of the people who came, mostly for my own benefit, and in the interest of preserving a memory.  No one will ever know if you skip reading any farther, and you're welcome to do so.  Those who see errors or omissions, please feel free to speak up.

My mother was a Beachy who grew up in Iowa.  She came from a family of ten children and was number eight in the family.     Surviving are an older brother and sister and a younger brother and sister.  All of them were able to come for the funeral, although traveling was not easy for all of them.
Mom's older brother Joe and his wife Mary (who is Dad's sister) came from Iowa.  Their sons Landon and Kenneth also came from there.  Another son Lloyd came from Canada, and a fourth son, Ellis, came from Alabama.  On a recent trip, Mary suffered both a stroke and a heart attack, but did not seem much the worse for either of those health problems.

Mom's younger brother Jesse and wife Ruth came from Gladys, VA.  Their daughter, Esther, and husband Richard Bowman traveled with them.  Richard had spent a summer working here at Miller Seed about 30 years ago, and many of us remember him from that time.  Ruth was a friend of my mother's before she was a sister-in-law.  She grew up in northern Indiana, with family at Woodlawn.  I think she was a Bontrager.

Mom's older sister Fannie Jane Miller came from Florida.  Her son Harold (Harry) came from Texas and her only daughter Lillian came from California.  Fannie Jane's husband died some time ago.  Harry is a pastor and works with hospice as a grief counselor.  Who knew?  Another son lives near our son in Asia.  Aunt Fannie Jane traveled with Dad's brother Mahlon and wife Fannie from Florida.  They had gone there to spend the winter.  All three of them had wheelchair service in the airports en route, and the wheelchair attendants were thoroughly confused by the two Fannie Millers they were to transport-until Fannie Jane helpfully spoke up and provided a middle name.

Mom's younger sister, Esther Zook came from Iowa.  She is a widow, and most of her children also came.  Larry and his wife Jewel and their two children and Jason and one of his sons, and Ella Jean Walker all came from the Kalona area.  Leon and Emma Zook came from their home in western Iowa with their family.  Aunt Esther's daughter Joyce and her husband Jerold (sp?) Martin came from South Carolina.

Cousin Ellen and husband Don Gingerich represented  my Uncle Ray's family.  They came from Stover, Mo.  We have visited in their home, and visited our friend Eunice Officer nearby several times before we discovered how close Ellen lived to her.  Don and Ellen came to help celebrate  my parents' 50th wedding anniversary in 2000, and visited here again last summer.  We appreciate their interest very much.

From Uncle Glen's family, came six of my first cousins:  Ruth, Roy, Alvin, and Timothy Beachy.  Two of their married sisters also came, Anna Mae and Mary Sue.  Anna Mae's husband Clayton and daughter Lois also came along.  These cousins of mine are also cousins to the grown children in the Alvin Yoder family, so they hosted some of these relatives.

Mom had three remaining siblings, John, Earl, and Jonas.  A wedding among Earl's descendants and a funeral in Jonas' family prevented most of the people from these families attending.  John's descendants who live in Iowa were from the church where the deceased man attended, so they were not inclined to leave at such a time.  The deceased man had five siblings who are married into Uncle Jonas' family, so they didn't come either.  Victor Kauffman, who lived with us for some time but now lives in Missouri, represented Earl's family, when many of the others had gone to the wedding in Pennsylvania.

So there you have the Beachy relatives' attendance summary.  The count stands at 42, by my calculations.

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At the small gathering for family before the funeral, my uncle Jesse shared a saying his brothers used to repeat among themselves about their sisters.  They called Esther the match, Mary, the fuse, and Fannie, the dynamite.  While Esther's and Mary's personality and role might be just a trifle ambiguous from this, no one will miss the implications of Fannie's designation.  Now, at the age of 91, she still shows evidence of that childhood identity.

Fannie provided many an entertaining moment over the time of the funeral, but early in the following week she became quite ill with Influenza, Type B.  She had been staying at the home of her cousin Lena (married to Vernon Miller).  It was clear that she would not be able to travel back to Florida on Wednesday with Mahlon and Fannie, and she moved instead to Marvin and Lois' house to finish recovering.  Late in the week, Lois took her to the doctor, who diagnosed the problem.  We were all relieved it wasn't pneumonia, which her deep cough made us fearful of.

Present plans are for Marvin and Lois to accompany her to Florida this coming Wednesday, a week later than originally planned.  The doctor thinks she should be able to manage that travel if this illness takes its normal course.

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I never realized until the time over Mom's funeral that she was precisely 4 1/2 years younger than Fannie and 4 1/2 years older than Esther.  The oldest in the family were boys, and brothers were interspersed between the sisters on either side of Mom in the family.  Esther is the youngest.

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Another revelation for me was something Myron picked up on more than I ever did--that Mom probably always felt some longing for Iowa, even after being away from there for 64 years.  Except for one very short time period--a year, perhaps--when her sister Esther lived in Kansas, she never again lived near her sisters.  Her brother Joe lived in Kansas a short time after he married a Kansas girl, but they moved to Iowa after that time.  Jesse moved away from Iowa relatively early in his marriage, and John did so late in life.  Fannie moved to Florida after their children were all gone from home.  Otherwise, most of the family lived and died in Iowa.

We always marveled at the diversity in Mom's family regarding church affiliation.  Two of them were in a "Nationwide" (Non-conference conservative) group, two were Old Order Amish, and two were "Sunnyside" (Conference Conservative).  Otherwise, no two of them attended the same church.  Mom was the only "Beachy" in this Beachy family.  Mom's parents, however, were among the people in Iowa who took a keen interest in the movement that eventually birthed the Beachy church, and attended a "missions" meeting in Kalona shortly before my parents' wedding.  People from here attended also, and I heard Willie Wagler refer to that meeting as a pivotal event in establishing what eventually became the Beachy church.  My grandparents stayed Old Order.

On a side note, I remember my mother saying that Dad was asked to be moderator at that meeting in Iowa.  The bishop who was to marry my parents (Will Yoder?), however, counseled him not to do so, and he refrained.  It's not clear to me whether the minister gave that counsel based on his own reservations about the wisdom of the direction this might take people (I didn't get that impression) or whether he feared that it would arouse concern from others.  Further randomness:  My impression is that the Amish in Iowa who stayed Amish actually became more insular after this, and less open to change and reaching out to others beyond themselves.  In 1950, the Amish in Iowa and Kansas had a lot in common.

Making a home in Kansas could not have been helped by the fact that the early years of Mom's living here coincided with very disagreeable and extreme summer weather.  As Myron described it, she  must have felt that she had left Eden for the Great American Desert.

I'll have to write another post on the people who came for the funeral, as I didn't nearly make it all the way around.