FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: GRANDMA DIES (PART 27)

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

During the winter of my first year at Flat River, Grandma became ill. At home on weekends, I'd walk the short distance over to her house. She and Grandpa had sold the farm and moved to Doe Run about a year after we had left. I would try to read to her as in the old days on the farm, but I could see her mind was not on the story. She would suddenly interrupt to ask me to look down her throat and try to see what was there she couldn't get up.

"Grandma, I just can't see a thing," I'd report.

"Well, she begged. "just reach down and see if you can get anything."

I did that too, among much gagging and coughing and spitting on her part.

"Just let it go," she said with sad resignation.

After my last try I went into the kitchen and pretended to busy myself at the old kitchen range, same one we'd used on the farm. I picked up the stove lid lifter Grandma had used thousands of times, and rearranged the lids, inspected the reservoir for water, opened the warming oven.

When Grandpa heard a tear sizzle on the warm stove top, he walked over and put a hand on my shoulder. "It's all right," he said.

It was a small gesture but comforting. He had accepted that life moves on and we have to move with it.

When I saw Grandma's old hands, gnarled by too much rheumatism, clasped in death, I thought of the doll dresses those hands had made, the little pieces of biscuit dough she had pinched off to let me "bake" on top of the stove, the only hands that old Star would let milk her. I'll think of these things, I said to myself, although "these things" could not stop the tears.

Grandma's death certificate reads: Date of death, February 9, 1932; cause of death, perinephritis abscess; contributing interstitial nephritis and arterio sclerosis. Age at death, seventy-seven years, one month.

She was buried in the Bonne Terre, Mo., cemetery, the town to which she had come from Virginia fifty years earlier.

Eternity as seen from an apple orchard

In addition to the above mentioned things about Grandma, I will remember her for her concept of Eternity.

On a lazy summer afternoon, Grandma would tie on a big, white, starched apron, get her basket of quilt scraps and head for the orchard. "A person could get a breath of air there," she explained. She would find a comfortable spot to sit, probably on the shady side of the Maiden Blush apple tree, and soon the click of needle against thimble would blend with other busy sounds -- insects droning, chickens clucking up in the barn lot.

I usually accompanied Grandma, hoping a ripe apple would fall at my feet or that Grandma might have a peppermint in the bottom of her basket.

The orchard fell away gently toward the meadow where we could see our cows lying in the shade of the river trees. Across the river were fields rising toward the hills that folded into each other higher and higher, blue deepening to indigo and then purple.

It was not a setting where one's thoughts would often take a dolorous turn; yet it was there in our orchard that I learned about Grandma's concept of Eternity.

Someone had recently died in our community. I had noticed that the folks roundabout skirted the word, died. They would say "passed away" or "gone home." Our minister had said Tim had entered Eternity. Grandma took issue with this. On a day in the orchard, I asked her why. "Nobody can enter Eternity," she said with conviction. "They're already there."

She took off her glasses and wiped them thoughtfully, "Eternity began a long time ago. No one can say for sure how long, but for starting point let us say it began on the first page of Genesis. You know about that don't you?" she asked, focusing her pale blue eyes on me.

I nodded that I did, then quoted what I'd learned in Sunday School, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

"That's right," she said. "Heaven and earth and all of time. That's Eternity."

She sewed a couple more patches together. Then, "Look," she said, pointing, "there's the barn lot up there. Here, next to it, is the orchard, and there, over the fence, are the pastures and fields and hills. Let's say the barn lot is that part of Eternity which was here before you were born. This orchard is the place where you are this minute. The pastures and fields and those high, mysterious hills are part of Eternity you'll learn about when you leave the orchard. It's all connected, see?"

I thought that over while the insects droned and the grasshoppers made high jumps. "But, Grandma, that means we're in Eternity now!"

"Exactly!" How pleased she was at my childish logic. I got a peppermint for it.

Grandma was not the first to reflect that Eternity is here and now. But she was the one who first told me about its immediacy and its endlessness. The picture she gave me of eternal change and progress brings me serenity. Why count the passing of my days in one place any more than in another? I feel so sure that life is all of a whole, a forever continuing chain of places and circumstances.

Sometimes I wish Grandma could have been buried right there under the Maiden Blush apple tree, but the time for little family graveyards had passed.

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.