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TALKING TO A SLEEPING MAN
The last time I saw my father alive we talked. Our conversations had become increasingly incoherent as time went by. This one was no different. We talked... and then he was tired. I helped him to his bed, and he went to sleep.
I sat in silence for an hour while he slept. Then I kissed his forehead and bade him good-bye. I walked away from the nursing home where he had spent the last eight years.
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TALKING TO A SLEEPING MAN
The last time I saw my father alive we talked. Our conversations had become increasingly incoherent as time went by. This one was no different. We talked... and then he was tired. I helped him to his bed, and he went to sleep.
I sat in silence for an hour while he slept. Then I kissed his forehead and bade him good-bye. I walked away from the nursing home where he had spent the last eight years.
The next time I saw my father he was laid out in his coffin. We brought him to the grave yard to lay his weary bones to rest.
In that last hour I listened to the quiet sounds, the quiet voice within. There are remembrances of conversations past. Conversations with this son of Mother Earth... this problem solver, this man who liked to make things work.
I remember a generation earlier...
"Amazing Grace How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind but now I see."
The words sung, voices only, rich... with no accompaniment... shook the rafters of the small wooden church on a dirt road in rural south Alabama.
She had been a member of this Primitive Baptist Church for nearly a century. Now this was her last visit. The congregation was gathered to celebrate her life and to wish her well on her journey into the afterlife.
Laney Bowman was the second wife of the man who was called to preach at this church, a man who bore the name of a president, a man whom she had outlived by more than fifty years. With his first wife Daisy Dean Lewis he had three children, William Hobson, John McKinley, and Pearl Irene.
Together Zachariah Taylor Marsh and Laney Bowman Marsh had six children, three sons and three daughters. The sons he named for famous men. Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Fox and Alonzo Desoto... a dream that they too would become famous. The daughters were Mary Idlewild, Mittie Augusta and the youngest, Pocahontas who died in infancy.
Zachariah Taylor Marsh, a Primitive Baptist Preacher, was also a teacher and a farmer. He was born in 1861. Born into a nation at war. Not a war in foreign lands, rather a war between states, a war of brother against brother; a war of father against son. A war in which six hundred thousand men lost their lives.
Everything in the South was lost, every where was devastation. Crops were destroyed. Farms were lost. Houses were burned. Livestock and work animals were killed. Carpet baggers and other agents of the North were hell bent on punishment and revenge.
This was the world in which Z. T. grew up and lived, and took this woman as his second wife. This is the world he left behind when he died those many years ago.
This was the world in which she lived her life. Her life of toil. She worked the land, from sun to sun. She scratched her meager living from the sandy fields of south Alabama. She plowed, she hoed, she raked. She pulled weeds and fought grass. She planted and gathered her vegetables for food. She had her flowers... she loved her flowers.
In her ninetieth year, the end was near. She struggled, she struggled mightily. She refused to die. She lived until her ninetieth birthday. And then she was gone.
Now I, the son of the second son, sit on a hand made wooden pew in the country church and listen to the voices, the hymns, and to the sermon eulogizing my Grandmother, the sermon of the Primitive Baptist Preacher. I think of my Grandfather, in this same small church, this same pulpit more than fifty years ago. Preaching his sermons to other old souls in other times.
I listen and I ponder...
"The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God who call'd me here below,
Will be forever mine."
I listen... and I ponder.
There is an epilogue... but that's another story for another day.
lazarus67
Nicely penned. Reminded me of my two departed parents, and also of my youngest brother who succumed to cancer just a few short months ago.