The last time I wrote a blog as a tribute to someone who had passed, it got pulled for legal reasons.
I wrote it about my aunt Sue, who died after a house fire was set - and it was pulled because a guy was being charged for setting the fire, and the "salute" might have caused undue sympathy in a jury pool... or some sort of asinine reason like that.
My mother-in-law passed away Tuesday evening, and I'm going to try once again.
I first met Sam just a couple of hours after her son and I had become engaged. I had agreed to go up and met her over the Thanksgiving break - Bill proposed to me on the drive up (during a snowstorm while driving on the freeway in Idaho) - and so he introduced us as, "Well, a funny thing happened on the drive here - here is your future daughter-in-law!"
I like Sam immediately - a sweet, white-haired little old lady (although she really wasn't that old!). And she liked me - I was very relaxed and up-front with her, and she and I stayed up and talked for a couple of hours while Bill went right to bed (he had done all the driving up there).
Sam was the ultimate small-town girl - she had born right outside of the town she lived in, had never learned to drive, never flown in a plane, and traveled probably at the most 400 miles away from her birthplace.
But whenever she was sitting down, she had a knitting needle or a crochet hook in her hand, and was always turning out amazing blankets, scarfs, dolls, animals, kitchen accessories... anything that would be put together with yarn!
She had raised her two kids alone - she said when she divorced her cheating husband, she didn't want to ever see him again or accept any money from him in child support or alimony. It wasn't easy - there were some very rough times - but she did it all on her own. And this is LONG before women's lib or feminism was afloat.
She lived in a tall wooden house her grandfather had helped built, and paid it off on her own. As her children moved out, she filled their bedrooms with stacks of yarn and craft projects.
The most time I spent with her was when our three kids and I lived with her, awaiting military housing to open up in Hawaii after our tour in Germany. It was a bit longer than three months, during one VERY hot summer in Oregon - but we had a lovely time. Sam was so happy to have her grandkids around - she had only one other grandchild up in Alaska - and never seemed to tire of them.
And she had some great stories to tell about growing up in a small town, and knew, it seemed like, EVERYthing about the majority of Milton-Freewater residents - either from growing up with them, their family, and all their relations, or knowing them from working at Safeway, managing the local movie theatre, or working as a book-keeper at JCPenney.
Sam did it all - it wasn't until just a few years ago that dementia began to creep in, and she'd tell us the same stories repeatedly. But she stayed in her home by herself with her cat, Annie, until her health deteriorated enough that she needed to be hospitalized.
She was then moved into an assisted-living facility, but Bill found one that accepted her cat also - a VERY important consideration. She only lasted a few weeks, and it is comforting that she didn't suffer very long.
I'm going to miss her.
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