Surviving Life's Heartbreaking Events

Before I leave the subject of my ancestors, I feel the need to relate a little about my mother’s side of the family. She had so many tragedies that it is sometimes easier to dwell on other subjects.

My grandfather and his wife moved to Nashville about the turn of the century from a small town in Kentucky. He was a conductor for the N.C.&St.L. Railroad but took correspondence courses for a law degree at the same time. He wasn’t quite through with the courses when he took the bar exam just for practice and passed it! So he opened a practice in Nashville which he maintained until his late 70’s.

My maternal grandmother died of cancer when my mother was 16 years old. Although, Granddad told Mother that he could never love anyone like her mother, he was married within 6 months. Naturally, Mother and her brother were crushed.

The marriage did not work out and five years later he was divorced, another embarrassment for the two siblings. Then Granddad married again, a college student who was about 25 years younger than he and a year younger than my mother. (I want to go on record here and say that my sisters and I loved this woman as much as if she were our real grandmother.) But this was the last straw for Mother and after graduating from college, she moved to Mississippi.

About a year after my parents married, Mother’s only brother John, her pride and joy, was killed in an accident on the Cumberland River. One wonders how she survived these six years of disasters in her life and retained her faith in God throughout it all.

If there were times when I didn’t understand Mother, I would often stop and remind myself of the many hardships she had endured. This process didn’t always take away my frustrations, but it certainly helped me in my own struggles to maturity.