ONE MEASURE

 

She was born before the First World War.  Her father abandoned her mother when She was a toddler.  A married aunt raised her into almost her early teens in a small Illinois town on the vast prairie landscape.  She then was taken to Chicago to Her mother’s new home, complete with a loving stepfather and new half-brother and half-sister.

 

It was the Roaring Twenties and Capone ruled Chicago with the Mayor and the Police.  Killings, corruption, and payoffs were routine matters as She grew into a young woman working without benefit of ever completing high school.

 

Gangland Chicago morphed seamlessly into the Depression but She always worked and Her aptitude with figures and Her easy manner with workmen (thanks in large part to Her printer stepfather) not only kept Her working, it even accounted for advancements.

 

She married in January of 1941 and exactly nine months later gave birth to a baby that grew into the author of this account.  Seven weeks after my birth, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the next day my father left with his Illinois National Guard Unit.  He served in Europe and didn’t return until 1945.  During that time She had to work both to replace Dad’s salary and to give my grandparents some money to care for me.  While She worked, I grew strong under my grandfather’s tutelage and my grandmother’s accounts of her youth and her families immigration from Ireland via Ohio to an Illinois farm.

 

Soon after the Japanese surrender and my father’s return, twins were born.  She was doing accounting work and managing glaziers for a large glass company while Dad returned to International Harvester and the tool and die work he knew well.

 

In short order She moved the family way out west of the city to north of what was then a small town on the Fox River, Saint Charles, Illinois.  For years She and Dad made the long commute past cornfields and Holsteins to maintain the rural lifestyle She knew as a child.

 

After my departure, She and Dad divorced.  Looking back, Her early life and traumas; added to a new family in a city rampant with crime and corruption, a Depression, four years of separation from Her new husband, and years of work while trying to raise three kids; took their toll in more ways than I could ever know.  I often think of that when the problems of my life seem big.

 

She moved to Northern Minnesota and spent the final decades of Her life living in an old but snug home on a hill overlooking a lake.  As She had done in Illinois, She raised dogs and made friends everywhere.  She got an Associate college degree.  She fought corrupt and lazy bureaucrats.  She helped people keep their property from the clutches of callous local doctors and lawyers that were enriching themselves beyond belief by preying on old and deceased persons and their estates.  In short, She worked for and loved those who were least able to help themselves.

 

She passed away a few years ago.  Since She had donated her body to the Mayo Clinic because of their kindnesses to her over the years, I notified them after She died, while I was at Her side, and they came and took away her body.

 

One year later they called me and said they had used Her body and cremated the remains and would bury Her if I wanted.  I asked them to send Her ashes to the small Catholic Church near where she died.  The priest from that Church had given Her last rites and heard Her confession shortly before her death and he agreed to keep the ashes until I could get there for a funeral Mass before burial in the small cemetery.

 

The funeral Mass was a simple affair with a few local parish ladies that did not know Her.  I dug Her grave, interred Her ashes in the ground and arranged for a headstone to be placed on the grave by a nearby stonemason.  That evening I took the priest to dinner and we talked for hours about his home in India, the travels through India by Saint Thomas the Apostle, and my Mother.  He had visited Her numerous times to bring Her communion at her home and, as we were doing, he had enjoyed many hours of pleasant conversation with Her on a wide range of topics.

 

Before the funeral service I had written an obituary that the Duluth newspaper (read over a large area of Northern Minnesota) kindly agreed to publish.  Several weeks after the burial I received a phone call from a lady that knew my Mother.  She said, “Mr. Beers, I don’t mean to be nosy, but didn’t your Mother ask for her ashes to be spread over a spot in the woods where many of her dogs had been buried?”  I responded that yes it was true.  I told her that after my Mother had asked that, I had mentioned it to a priest in my home parish in Virginia.  He told me that it was definitely not proper to spread ashes over your favorite duck blind or a golf course where you had made a hole in one.  Ashes should be interred in blessed ground in a reverent acknowledgement of the immortal soul that had once inhabited them.  I explained to the lady that I had thought long and hard about this and decided to let it remain unmentioned and to bury her in blessed ground if it came up.  I apologized to the lady if this offended her but it was my decision and I did what I believed to be the right thing.  The lady was gracious and thanked me for explaining it, and hung up.

 

It was almost a year and a half before the stonemason told me by mail that the gravestone had been carved and placed on the grave.  Three times over the next three years, I started out to visit the grave in the tiny cemetery and three times serious storms made the trip all but impossible.

 

Recently, my wife and I spent a week with her family on a Minnesota lake.  One day the weather was rainy so my wife and I drove several hours North to visit the gravesite by the tiny Church.

 

It was raining as we parked on the shoulder of the sandy road alongside the cemetery.  Through the blurry windshield I smiled to see that the gravestone I had ordered was as I had ordered and placed just above where I had buried Her.  I put on a hat and jacket and walked through the rain over to the grave.

 

As I reached the grave, a surprise brought a second smile to my face.  Lo and behold, flat in the ground and about two feet from the headstone I had purchased was a second gravestone!

 

The headstone I had erected read “Beloved Mother” (dates) and “Mary E. Beers” with a Cross carved on the stone.  The flat headstone, flush with the ground read, “In Loving Memory”, “Mary N. Beers”, “From Her Friends” with a drawing of a doe and fawn amidst some trees and hills.

 

As I stood there in the rain it occurred to me that what finer memory was there from those of us that knew Her than one headstone from Her son and one from Her friends.  What happens after death is a radically individual matter between each of us and God.  What the living do after others die about their memories or about their deeds can be a help to others, in their daily lives.  A Lady that receives two headstones is one that is remembered fondly by both Her son and Her friends, a worthy goal for each of us.  There are many measures of one’s life but if one looks for one final measure, somehow receiving two headstones seems to be something that reflects a life well spent.  

 

Oh yes.  The reason for the different middle initials on the headstones is worth mentioning.  Her Birth Certificate read, “Mary Nowata Baker”.  Her Baptismal Certificate read, “Mary Ellen Baker”.  She told me that you could not be baptized with a name that was not one of a saint in those days, hence the “Ellen”.  All her life She went by “Mary E.” although everyone that knew Her more than just in passing, eventually knew of the Indian name She received at birth.  She would be happy to confirm that both headstones, like her devotion to Her family and many friends, are correct.

 

So, if you are ever in a small Northern Minnesota cemetery and come upon a grave with two “different but the same” headstones: you will know the story of the one Lady, both a “Beloved Mother” and good “Friend” with different middle names that they commemorate.

 

Jim Beers

8 July 2008