We’re taking my ninety-six-year-old mom to bury her little brother. She’s reclined in the van seat beside me, two coats over her, another three layers underneath, and the car heater blowing.
“After the funeral tomorrow,” she says, “I want to go to the graveside service.”
This will be in the mountains on a cold spring day.
She’ll sit there in a winter coat we packed for the occasion and hear words of comfort before the casket is lowered into the earth. This cemetery scene has become familiar to her, having now lost three older siblings and five younger.
Of this warm, generous-spirited family of eleven children, only my mom and her youngest sister will be there to hear the nephews form a men’s chorus to sing a final farewell for their last uncle. One other living sister will be at home in bed, unaware of the shrinking of what was once a large family.
And still is. From those eleven came—at last count— 55 children, 165 grandchildren, 274 great-grandchildren, and 35 great-great grandchildren. With in laws, the family numbers well over 700.
My mom and her youngest sister might be bereft of siblings as they pay their respects to their brother. Nonetheless, they will be surrounded by a clan.
But many of the 700 will be missing. Not because Uncle Carl isn’t loved or worth memorializing, not because they don’t care. But because they do—about children and grandchildren and students and clients and employers and employees.
They’ll be out there living like a Bender—honoring Uncle Carl by doing the good they can with warm and generous spirits.
Apple to Apple 
Bless you, Phyllis. I fleetingly thought about making the trip. Carl (and your mother) would be my cousins once removed. My father and your mother were 1st cousins. I hope the trip went well, and that it was a blessed time for both you and your mother.
LikeLike
A wonderful tribute to the Bender family legacy of which I’m very grateful to belong!
I wonder if anyone would want to compile a Norman Bender Family book?! I would buy one!
~Lorenda O
LikeLike
Family funerals are such a contradiction of gain and loss. It is worth the effort invested, the emotional wear and tear, the tears the laughter, the remembering, the regretting, the hugs (sometimes rueful) and just the whole experience of a family coming together to reaffirm that “we are still a family!” May God give all of you much grace and strength and courage and patience.
LikeLike