My mom died last Sunday at 90 after years of Alzheimer's relentless mind-eroding cruelty.
To cope, I immediately did what I do. I wrote.
In a half-hour of keyboard flurry, I knocked out a stream-of-consciousness obituary that I barely changed in editing.
I thought only of Mom as I wrote. But it turned out I was telling a classic Arkansas story familiar to thousands.
Mom's story was of a state and culture spanning seismic events--the Depression of 1930 and the pandemic of 2020.
Ozella Bearden Brummett lived a mournfully joyous childhood in a dirt-poor tenant farming family in the backwoods of northern Howard County in southwestern Arkansas.
Her early life was mournful in the sense that there is a fully accepted, proudly borne lamentation to living that poor. And her early life was joyous in the love of family and the promise of a better day through the Lord.
Drive rural Arkansas and you can still see the panorama of Ozella's formative years. On the state highway you'll pass gravel roads leading into the woods. Then you'll inevitably pass a modest structure that is the small-town Church of Christ.
The seeming contradiction--of mournfulness and joy--was best expressed in songs like one of Mom's favorites, "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms."
It's a 19th century classic that declares celebration outright by invoking "what a joy divine." But the tone and lilt of the hymn invoke a dire burden in the need to lean on the Lord to be kept "safe and secure from all alarm."
At 22, Ozella married a fellow child of a tenant-farm family, a shy, wiry fellow five years older who was back from hell on the Marine front line in Okinawa. She had an eighth-grade education; he a seventh.
Fate brought them to the big city of Little Rock, where soon they were joined by a son who would become a reviled newspaper columnist and a daughter who would earn a master's degree.
All over Arkansas, there are baby boom kids living blessed lives of ease and accomplishment because of the hard work and dedication of parents who struggled through the Depression and managed on distant lands to get missed or only grazed by the killing weaponry of the Germans and Japanese.
So, at this writing on Thursday, I was intending to attempt on Friday morning to tell a story at Mom's graveside service. I'll write it here, knowing that I quite possibly will not get through the telling.
A few years ago I was interviewed about my life for the better part of a day at the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral History at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. After nearly four morning hours in a vaulted sound studio, we'd advanced only through my childhood and teen years when word came that lunch sandwiches had arrived for an hour's break.
The incisive rascal interviewing me, Scott Lunsford, said he'd like to summarize what I'd told him and then ask one more question before lunch.
He proceeded to recall that I'd said my lingering image of my dad from childhood was of his working nights at a warehouse and getting up in the morning to run a one-man rural garbage route in unincorporated southern Pulaski County, and that the lingering image of my mom was of her standing over a hot skillet with a peeled potato in one hand and knife in the other, splashing carved sections of the potato into sizzling, smoking Crisco.
He recalled that he'd asked me about my chores and that I'd said I didn't remember ever making my own bed and could recall only one occasion when I washed dishes.
Then he repeated the story of my 16th year when I wrote a letter to the editor of the dying afternoon Arkansas Democrat to ask for a part-time sportswriting position. And I got it, necessitating that I get downtown at 6 a.m. to work two hours before school, helping put out the afternoon sports pages.
But we had one car, and dad needed it. Then I heard my mom and dad in low conversation in the kitchen. I knew what was happening. They would find some way to make at least a down payment on another used car, freeing the family sedan for me to drive downtown before dawn to begin what's now nearly 52 continuous years of newspaper employment.
After a thoughtful pause, Lunsford asked: "Do you have any idea how much those good people sacrificed to spare you any inconvenience of their struggles?"
I told the story the other night to a friend who said it was poignant, yes, but that it also was simple good parenting, common to every generation, that seeks to spare its children the hardships and perils it knows.
So, if we're lucky, the story also will connect more broadly as a classic Arkansas saga.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.