I’ve spent much of today with family, saying goodbye to my great aunt, Jo Evans, who died the end of last week at 102. I was a pallbearer this morning with my brother and cousins, then there was a luncheon, and finally a memorial service this afternoon at Shandon Baptist Church, where she was the oldest member, having joined 70 years ago.
Once, when I was young enough to be taken aback at the notion — I don’t think I’d ever been to a funeral at the time, and didn’t know what was expected, but supposed they were nothing if not somber — my Uncle Woody (who of course was there today) and I were looking at a family album, and as we viewed a page of candid shots of smiling relatives happily chatting in their Sunday best, he remarked that the Paces always had a good time at funerals. Meaning they enjoyed each other’s company. Jo’s, and my maternal grandmother’s, maiden name was Pace. They were from Marion.
Today was the biggest gathering of Paces — and Collinses and Warthens and many other branches — in a number of years, and we all enjoyed one another’s company, as we have for generations.
We also enjoyed the kind presence of others, such as Shandon Baptist Pastor Dick Lincoln, and Minister of Senior Adults Jerry Long, and the talented singers who Jo had particularly wanted to perform at her funeral, as she and my mother had planned it out a year and a half ago.
And still others, such as Lanier Jones, president of ADCO — who knew Jo many, many years before he knew me. He knew her through her job at Tapp’s department store, where she worked into her mid-80s.
That was the thing that people kept marveling over today: In terms of health and having her faculties about her, Jo was until only weeks ago not much different from my very first memories of her. Dick Lincoln said that if we knew we could be that healthy, we’d all want to live to be 102. Jerry Long said she was briefly lucid again when he visited her the night before she died. That was not the case when I saw her hours before she died, which was a shock to me.
Four of my children, and three of my grandchildren, were with us at the church today. Over the weekend, I suddenly realized that to my grandchildren, Aunt Jo was the sister of their great-great grandmother. That’s the same relationship I have to the Civil War generation. Five of my great-great grandfathers (think about it; you get eight) were South Carolinians who served the Confederacy in uniform.
Then, with a further jolt, I realized that when my grandmother — Jo’s sister — died, the morning after Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon, I was almost exactly the same age my eldest granddaughter is now. Jo’s husband, whom I barely remember, died in 1960.
And yet, so very long after her contemporaries were gone — we lost her last sister in the early ’90s — Jo carried on, active in work, in her church (where she sang in the choir, including Shandon’s renowned Singing Christmas Tree), and in her community. She had no children, but she had a wealth of nieces and nephews and their descendants, and she was a part of all their lives.
I tell you all this because that’s where I’ve been today and that’s what I’m thinking about. But I also share it to help you understand just how shocking I found Rick Stilwell’s death on Friday, only hours after we lost Jo. Even though I only knew him in the virtual sense, as RickCaffeinated. The irony was reinforced on Sunday, when their pictures were practically side-by-side on the obit page (see above). Rick Stilwell was 44, living his life, driving down the street, when he just died, without any sort of warning. Rick would have been a babe in arms when my grandmother died. So Aunt Jo outlived her, essentially, by Rick Stilwell’s whole life.
Words are inadequate to describe the emotional distance between what his family is experiencing today and what mine did. I am so, so sorry for their loss.
We just don’t have the slightest idea, do we? We could go right now. Or we could continue, without even slowing down much, until we’re almost 103.
Yeah, I know that lots of people have realized this before. It’s in the Bible, and everything. But I say it because that’s what I’m thinking about today.
