Rosellen

 

Today we turn a page in history. On the Rakestraw side I had 35 cousins who had 18 aunts and uncles, of which Mom was the last one living.  On the Griffith side Mom was the last of 4 children.  With Mom’s passing my cousins and I are all now the oldest generation, a fact we are all keenly aware of. 

It has been a few years now since they came out with DNA testing, but I remember we all bought the kits and sent them our spit, only to learn that we were from the British Isles as we had always expected.  Along with the DNA kits at the time I also had the pleasure of having my sister drop off several totes of Mom’s old pictures to “sort through when I had time”.

The combination of the pictures and the DNA kits made me realize I had questions about my ancestry, especially on Mom’s side, as there were a lot of pictures in the totes with people I could not identify, and parts of the story I didn’t know.  Fortunately, the process of discovering these things has become much easier and the information has gone digital and become available online. 

We began filling in the blanks, learning about her great grandparents and where they all came from.  The saddest part of this process was that Mom had already begun losing the ability to come up with her words, and we had no way to ask her questions about her childhood and her relatives.  At that point all we could do was rely on the information we had found and match it to the few stories we had heard from Mom over the years. 

It’s an interesting story.  William Griffith was born in eastern Tennessee, and he moved to Sebree, KY where he married Ellen Wise and opened the first store in the 1860’s.  They had several children including Charlie, who was born in 1873.  In 1900 Charlie married his Mom’s first cousin, Lillie Mae Wise, and they had a boy name John in 1901.  Charlie and Lillie were together at least 20 years and John grew up and moved to Terre Haute. 

But…something happened in the 1920’s, and the two split up. Lillie Wise moved in with her sister, and by 1926 Charlie had met Clyde Ella Eastwood, and they had a boy together named Charles Griffith Jr.

Clyde Ella Eastwood had been born in 1897, and her mother Rosa died when she was 8 years old. In 1915 she married William Brown.  They had a son named Dorris in 1916, and then William Brown died in 1919 leaving Grandmother Clyde a widow.  When she had Uncle Charles Grandmother was 29 and Grandpa Charlie was 53.

Clyde and Charlie raised Uncle Charles and Uncle Dorris together until 1936 when Dorris married Ruby Williams and moved out.  They next year, in 1937, when Charlie was 65 and Clyde was 41, 35 years after John Griffith was born, 21 years after Uncle Dorris, and 11 years after Uncle Charles, Clyde Ella gave birth to a baby girl who they named after her grandmothers Rosa and Ellen.  Rosellen Rakestraw was born on June 10, 1937.

The family was very poor.  Whatever glory days Charles Griffith may have had raising bloodhounds or selling automobiles were behind him, and the Depression had hit everyone hard anyway.  Grandmother worked very hard as a seamstress and a housekeeper.  Grandpa Charles had a broom making machine and he would make brooms, but he spent a lot of time drinking and listening to the radio.Uncle Charles did not get along with his father, and as a young teen he moved out into the YMCA to get away from home.  He ended up marrying Betty Lambdin and they had my cousin Brenda in 1951.

By the time Mom graduated from high school in 1955 her father had been bedridden for some time.  He died in 1956. The year she graduated she met Arch Rakestraw in November and they were married the next month in December.  Rosellen was in love.  The new couple moved to Evansville where Arch was working at Chrysler.  Greg was born two years after they got married, and soon after the little family moved to Manchester, MO as Chrysler moved production there. In 1961 they moved from Manchester to Ellisville, and I was born.  Mom and Dad would like in that house on Marsh Avenue in Ellisville for three decades, having Joe in 1967 and Sharon in 1971.

When her kids grew up, Mom got a job at the elementary school behind her house, helping care for kids after school.

In the mid-90’s when Dad had retired, they moved from the little house on Marsh back down to Kentucky.  Mom loved it down here, but they ended up moving back to St. Louis to the house on Sioux Trace, where they lived until Dad died and then Mom went into assisted living and then Memory Care. 

The DNA and birth, death, and marriage records fill in a lot of details and provide a lot of information about the past.  Looking into Mom’s genealogy has been fascinating.  The Eastwoods settled Kentucky with Squire Boone.  Samuel Timmons ran a store on the Great Wagon Road.  Jonas Griffith came from Wales in the 1760’s.  But those records provide little color or insight into the personalities of the people themselves.  What kind of people were they, REALLY?

My mother is now gone, and future generations will not be able to get to know her.  She will be a set of records and dates, but they will not know the warmth and love of her personality.  And I suspect that many will doubt the records themselves, as it’s going to seem unlikely that a 65-year-old man was the father of this little girl and not her grandfather, as the kids in her school used to think.

It is said that each of us are a different person now than we were 10 years ago.  People change, times change, and who you were 10 years ago is not who you are today.  Mom lived through the 8 ½ decades with the most change in all human history.  She was born into a very agrarian society in rural western Kentucky, then migrated along with an entire generation into the suburbs, where America built an entire new culture in the 1950’s and 1960’s. 

In her early and mid-20’s Mom was making a life and a home in a suburb in Ellisville, MO with two young boys and a new church and new schools and living next to a bunch of new people who had also just moved in from someplace else also.  So Mom started making new friends.  She toned down her Kentucky accent just a bit and dove headlong into being a part of her community. 

In the country people develop deep relationships and lean on each other in a way that you just can’t do in the suburbs, but Mom didn’t know that.  She developed deep relationships, including the next-door neighbors, Mary and Virgil Jett.  Our neighborhood had lots of young families with lots of boys and Mom was in heaven watching kids play in the back yard.  She was active at the new Ellisville United Methodist church and she and Dad developed great relationships with people like Gerry and Pat Primm.  We went every Sunday.

Once she began having grandkids, Mom entered a new phase of her life.  Dad retired and they moved to Saint Charles and Mom became Granny.  Once again, Mom was in heaven.  Once again, they got to know their neighbors and developed friendships, although by this time suburbia had grown wary of such things, but Mom and Dad didn’t know any other way. 

The final chapter, the last decade, was the saddest and the hardest as Granny Rose lost first the ability to communicate, and then the ability to remember.

We speak of her peaceful gentle nature, and it is true.  But make no mistake, my mother could be fierce.  Mom didn’t like bullies.  And she was gentle and reasonable until someone threatened one of her kids (or when one of her kids threatened another).

Mom never spoke much about growing up, or her Dad, or the poverty.  We didn’t hear much about John, or divorces.  When we were growing up it seemed that everyone got married and stayed married forever, and broken families were for other people.  Respectability was important, but Mom liked to paint a sunny picture of things. 

But it wasn’t all sunny.  I don’t know what Grandpa Charles was like because I never met him.  But I know Uncle Charles didn’t care for him, and although Rosellen loved him, we knew there must have been a dark side.  Grandmother made a commitment to an imperfect person, and she kept that commitment.  I DID know my Grandmother, and she exuded a gentle, sweet spirit along with an obvious work ethic.  Grandmother did what she had to do to keep her family going.

Growing up when we would visit Kentucky we were a little overwhelmed with all of the Rakestraws.  I have 35 cousins on that side, and they are all a bit loud.  On Mom’s side I only had one full cousin, and that was Brenda, Uncle Charles’ daughter.  We loved it when Charles would visit with Brenda, and we could feel the love Mom had for her brother and niece.  We knew Dorris and Ruby as well, and Mom loved to visit with them. 

Dad was 9 years older than Mom, and she married him a month after meeting him right after graduating high school. She was ready to leave home.  When Dad went into the automotive world, he became a part of that culture, which was aggressive and somewhat dysfunctional.  Coming from a family of 7 boys and 2 girls he understood that harsh and competitive environment and he threw himself into it and did well, but he ended up carrying a lot of that home.

Mom provided the Yin to Dad’s Yang; the warmth and love to counter the hard, stern, and stubborn nature that was Dad’s when we were young.  But Dad grew as well, and gradually he softened his nature, with the Arch of 1965 being a lot different than the 1985 version.  Like Grandmother Clyde, Mom made a lifelong commitment to an imperfect human being and she stuck to that commitment.  So did Dad, of course, providing the qualities Mom didn’t have to make the family whole. 

What, then, is her legacy?  What should we tell those who would seek to know what kind of person lies behind a lot of dates and places in a family tree?  Her legacy is not in her titles.  It’s not in her list of professional accomplishments.  It’s not her bank account or leadership positions in organizations.  There are no statues, and she didn’t set any world records.

Her legacy is here today.  Just as her specialness lay in her humanity, her legacy is in her effect on the human beings she left behind.  My Mother cared for children. In the 1960’s and 1970’s she raised four children.  In the 1980’s and 1990’s she was an amazing Granny to a great group of grandchildren, and she worked at the Elementary school.  In the last few years, she became a great grandmother, even as her memory was being stolen from her.

Mom’s legacy is here with her grandchildren, with Caroline, Eric, and Caitlin’s beautiful, polite, and loving children.  I don’t believe in reincarnation but if I did I would swear Mom is there in dear little Evelyn, in her love and kindness.  It isn’t something that can be put into the family tree, but her kind nature was evident whenever anyone spoke to her for 5 minutes. 

How cruel is Fate, to deny this most social of creatures her ability to speak, to have the very conversations upon which her life was based?  And yet, even in the darkest of circumstances she found ways to share her love with those around her.

One of the most touching events of the past two weeks was when Mom’s primary caregiver for the past few years came to pay her final respects.  She dropped by with tears in her eyes and spent a few moments with Mom.  This woman then described the love that she had felt for and from Mom, and how very special she was, without ever having heard Mom talk to her.  Through pats and smiles the love came through.  That was Mom. 

We think of her as “ours”, but my mother had an effect on a lot of people.  She was Mom, but she was also a gift to her parents, brothers, and grandchildren.  She was a gift to Dad’s family and Ellisville and to her neighborhood in St. Charles and the kids she worked with at school, and eventually to the care facility where she spent her final days.

In those last couple of days, we brought in a couple of Mom’s great grandchildren to visit, and they played and made us laugh a little and we knew that’s what Mom would have wanted, even if she couldn’t see them anymore.  The heart sometimes understands things that the brain cannot comprehend, and Mom could understand things from her heart rather than her brain. 

We all face hardships in our life, and sometimes the road can get very heavy. Life can be painful.  Like Mom, when life gets rough, we draw strength from our family and friends.  There are people who are going to be there for you, whether then can “fix” things or not.  We need to let then hug us and love us like Mom would have, whether or not it fixes the problem.  And we need to remember that you get to be a new person every decade, and how you react to the hardships you face is up to you.

You get to choose how you react to Life.  But whatever you do, be kind to the “littles”.  Treat them with respect, love, and kindness.  Teach them gently about Life.  Protect them. Then perhaps we can make the transition, as Rose did, to seeing the adults as just slightly older children, struggling to make it in a grown-up world.  And we can give them a hug and bring them a cold drink and maybe sit a spell and visit with them. 

 

Memorial donations can be sent to:

Mt. Pleasant Cemetery 

c/o Kay Moore, Treasurer

3072 Rakestraw Bottoms Rd

Slaughters, KY 42456