March 29

Tomorrow will be March 29,2009. It has all of the prospects of being an ordinary day. It will be Sunday and we will have a Sunday morning breakfast and will attend a special event in the afternoon. March 29, 1960 also seemed to be an ordinary day. But, it wasn't. It was a beautiful sunshiny Spring day. I went to school and after school, a group of us played softball on the school playground. We were having a wonderful time, enjoying the beginning of Spring and the end of a bad winter. All of a sudden we heard sirens and could see flashing lights. When you live in a community as small as Spottsville, you know it isn't good, because you know everyone that lives there. My children could never understand why sirens would always make me nervous, even when we moved to Owensboro and lived on the main ambulance route. It seemed like only seconds before my mother came to get me. My grandfather had just suffered a major heart attack. He was digging up a cherry tree to transplant. Cherry blossoms always remind me of him.

There had been deaths in our family of great grandparents and other extended family. Never had I suffered such a loss. That was the day that I lost my youth. I felt such an enormous loss and felt that nothing would ever be the same in my life. It wasn't. My father suffered from Post Traumatic Stress from his WWII service and was more fragile than I knew. No one called it that in those days. I never remember any of the bad times with him until my grandfather died. He never seemed to get over his death. The death of his father must have triggered the thoughts of all of the death he had seen. My father died in 1969 and I can remember very few days that weren't filled with mental anguish. He suffered severe depression and the affects from multiple medications and binge drinking. My father was a gentle man with a wonderful heart, but he could never recover from his losses. I always empathize with our young soldiers who come back from war and will never be the person who went to war.

My grandmother suffered from a terminal lung condition called Bronchiacticus. She was not only sick, but was afraid to stay alone at night. My cousin Jolene and I became the night sitters. Although we alternated nights, it seemed to me that I stayed many more nights. The length of the night seemed to be in direct proportion to her health. I thought at the time that she was old. In fact, she was the same age that I am now. She would have horrendous coughing fits and I would always think that she was dying. To this day, nighttime coughing can make me cringe.
It sounds cruel that you would put a child in that situation--but there were some great nights also and the maturity that I gained made me who I am today. I became her friend and confidant. You wouldn't believe the stories that she would tell. I sometimes think that I inherited or learned my sense of fun and curiosity from her. She taught me to drink coffee or hot tea in the morning. I had to drink something hot before I went to school. She loved to dance, a good joke and a good prank. She was a wonderful cook and she hated to iron. She loved the color lavender, a clean house, her indoor bathroom, no-iron fabric and jewelry. I don't think of her as often as I did, but when I do, I have learned to edit out those scary nights and replace them with giggles from her bed. My grandmother died 1 1/2 years after my grandfather, and I went back home at nights.

My maternal grandfather died within two years of my paternal grandfather. It seemed that death would always be a part of my life. All three of the grandparents that I have talked about died by the time they were my age. My Grandmother Heppler lived to see both of my children born and almost grown. She became my rock. Just so you will know---I plan to have Mama Heppler's genes. I'm not going anywhere. There is too much more for me to do!