Media vita in morte sumu is the opening line to a Gregorian chant from the 1300s. Translated it means: In the midst of life we are in death. The chant is a call on God for rescue in trouble times. It was a quote one of my dearest friends, Carol Beardsley, used to say from time to time. She also would quote Jules Verne: While there is life, there is hope.
The wise man of Ecclesiastes talked about a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die. This year has certainly been a time for beginnings and endings. My uncle, Willard Ritter, died last night. In the span of nine months, Mother has had to say goodbye to her oldest and now her youngest brothers. Uncle George died March 29th. Interestingly, their wives (JoeAnn and Dean) both died within months of each other in 2013. Uncle Jack Ritter died in 2003. Mother is the last of the Ritter siblings on the farm.
Uncle Willard had a hard life from the beginning. His mother died when he was 10 months old. He lived for a while (as did Mother) with his Uncle Brant and Aunt Alice Brandon. Grandma Lovie's desire was that Grandpa not separate their four children. Within in a few months, all four of his children were back home with him in their rented home in Spivey, Tennessee. Uncle Willard was raised by his daddy and aunts, uncles and friends. He had some mental challenges all his life. Some say he was "just a little slow on the uptake". He was a farmer and loved the old bluegrass music. He tried his hand at playing guitar and banjo.
When Big Daddy and Mother moved back to the homeplace in 1987, Mother tried to help Uncle Willard but, it finally fell on my sister Rita to help the Uncles and Aunts Ritter when she moved to the farm in 2000. We can't say either one - sister or niece -- did not try their best to see to the needs and wants of them all.
I remember coming to Grandpa's farm in the summers of my childhood. I remember the days the peddler came lumbering down the road in front of the house with his little old bus jammed full of candies and other items for sale. We would ask a quarter from Grandpa and the three uncles and with that whole dollar buy a bulging brown paper sack of sweets that lasted the rest of our visit on the farm.
In my memory, Uncle Willard was the assistant to Grandpa in the kitchen. I can recall watching him make biscuits from scratch. He would dip down in the tall barrel that held the flour and put that amount in a metal pan. He added other dry ingredients and melted lard that came off the old wood cook stove. He mixed it with his hands, then rolled it out on the long board that sat atop the barrel of flour. His biscuit cutter was an old coffee cup that had lost its handle. He baked the biscuits in a metal pan in the wood burning stove. It still amazes me how they cooked and baked on that stove.
Grandpa Dewey's farm was always an adventurous place for my brothers and sisters to enjoy each July and every other Christmas of our childhood. In the last week of my brother James life, he asked each of us: "If you could go back to a time in your childhood, where would you go?" I think both he and I replied -- Grandpa's farm. The uncles were a big part of those memories as they led us down to wade the creek on the backside of the farm and helped us roast peanuts and pop corn in the fireplace on those cold winter nights of Christmas.
There will be no parades or big write-ups in the newspaper about Uncle Willard. We will just take him to rest next to his wife in the Clementsville Cemetery on the Tennessee/Kentucky state line later this week. He will be surrounded by his aunts, uncles and grandparents. The Gregorian chant continues:
Of whom may we seek for succour*,
but of Thee, O Lord
Uncle Willard, Mother, Uncle Jack and Uncle George
*support in times of hardship and distress