Our dad was twenty-eight years when he was welding a gasoline tank that had been empty for a year--but had some residual gasoline fumes. The resulting explosion took his life and that of a bystander, who was watching. I was nineteen months and my brother Chuck was three months. You can imagine how devastating this was for my mother. In 1930 the Great Depression was at its height. No funds were available for widows and dependent children and we moved in with my grandmother.
She said that as long as she had food, we would have food. The Lord provided well and we never lacked for anything that we needed. Like Ronald Reagan: "We were poor, but didn't know it!" Mother had the home that our dad had provided and rented it to folks that never did pay the rent. Apparently they didn't have any money either.
We never went through the pain of losing a father, but memories of a dad are a vacuum. Mother did not talk much about the past. She felt that the Lord permitted this in His plan for her life. I never heard her complain about being a widow at such a young age and this not complaining is an inspiration to me. At her death in 1980, she had been a widow for fifty years and one day.
My dad became a Christian just before emigrating to the States from the Black Forest area in Germany. To meet him in heaven is one of many reasons I look forward to that day referred to in I Thessalonians 4:16-17.
2 comments:
Another good reason to participate in a family blog is to hear these interesting stories...of what's happening now with the little children in the family and the unknown stories from the past. Thank you for sharing, Aunt Mim.
I'm not sure I ever heard the whole story of how your father died, but knew it was when you were very young. Your mother, grandmother, and aunts (right?) did a wonderful job of raising two small children.
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