Great great great grandma Mary has been dead 104 years. She died during the influenza pandemic of 1918 though we can’t find the exact date she died on. She was 35 or 36. She was a fantastic mother to her 5 daughters. My great great grandmother was the oldest and she was only 13 when her mother passed. Mary’s youngest daughter was a toddler. Mary wasn’t buried in the churchyard, maybe because of the pandemic or maybe because her husband didn’t want her to be too far away. It’s unclear. It’s also unclear if she had another headstone or grave marker besides the rock.
What is clear is that before her death, there was a fantastic harvest of persimmons on the property and she canned an abundance of persimmon jam. After her death, my great great great grandfather Robert ate the persimmon jam on toast every morning and cried. I remember this because my great grandmother used to tell my grandmother about being a girl and seeing her father sitting at the kitchen table bawling for his wife. Alone in this world, missing the woman he had been married to for 16 years, thinking of her as he ate the last of the things she had made for the family. Most widowers with young children got remarried quickly in those days. He didn’t. He raised his girls alone and died at 60, never having remarried.
My grandmother is named Mary, after her mother’s mother who lies in a cow pasture with a rock to mark her grave. A woman who died entirely too young, who died wanted and loved and needed.
Every unmarked grave has a story like this.
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