After a marriage of more than fifty years, six children, twenty-nine grandchildren and sixty-six great-grandchildren; after more than a decade of caring for an ailing husband, surgeries of her own, including a knee replacement and a brain tumor removal; and after spending a large percentage of her adult life in a small home heated by a coal stove—at age 86, there she sat in our living room, smiling and reminiscing about her “wonderful life.” Mom had just completed a cross-country flight from her home in East Tennessee for a visit. We sat there together for some time as she related story after story with a look of contentment on her face. Despite a long life filled with both good times and bad, it struck me how, on this night, all that seemed to come to her mind were the good memories.

She shared with me again the story of how she and Dad met. She shared happy memories of their courtship and early-married life together. She smiled as she told me of their first home together. It was a one-room rented apartment; so small it did not even have a closet. Dad was resourceful and hung a rope across one side of the room to hang their clothes on. He called it their “Wardrope.”

Once when they were dating, Dad picked Mom up in a car that had the floorboard missing; it was a work-in-progress. She could look down and see the road rushing by underneath her feet. Dad, who never worried about having the finer things in life, jokingly told her that if he yelled, “stop” she would need to quickly put her feet down!

Mom and Dad first met when she was sitting up at a wake for her grandmother. In those days it was customary for family to stay up around the clock with the deceased. People from the community would gather to pay their respects similar to a viewing. During the wake, a handsome young soldier in uniform stepped into the living room. He apparently caused quite a stir among the young women-folk. Mom chuckled, saying that all the young ladies in the house were stepping over each other to see who could bring him a fresh cup of coffee: everyone except her that is. When someone asked if she was going to take him a cup she said, “It looks like he has plenty of people seeing to that.”

Mom and Dad did eventually meet that night and, well as they say, the rest is history. They were married on the side of an old dirt road in Habersham, Tennessee, near Stinking Creek. They were married there because the only preacher they could find at the time told them he was busy and could only perform the service if they could meet him there along the side of the road. And that is what they did.

One of the last memories Mom shared with me that evening involved the small house I grew up in. It had three small bedrooms and one bath—imagine that, one bath and six children! Mom said she had an opportunity to visit the home a few years ago. The people living there gave her a tour. After seeing the living area they walked her around the house to see the basement. The basement was just as they had left it: unfinished, damp and cold. Mom recalled that she and Dad were making plans to finish the basement to convert it into much needed living space. About that same time, the small congregation that Mom and us kids attended church with started a building project; they had met for many years in rented homes and office buildings. Members were asked to donate as much as they could to assist in the project. Dad, who was not a member of the church and who had always referred to himself as, “not a religious man” was, nonetheless, a very generous man. Mom said that the basement was never finished because Dad donated the money to the building fund. I had never thought much about that damp dirt basement until that night when Mom told me the rest of the story; now the basement has become a treasured memory.

Through the good and the bad, Mom and Dad stuck it out for over 50 years! After a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, Dad passed away on February 1, 1998. Just as he had given all that he had monetarily to his family and others in need, Mom gave all that she had to give in those final years caring for her “solider boy”. Over the span of more than a decade, all of Dad’s memories faded. Eventually, he even forgot Mom’s name. But she never forgot and never gave up. Through it all she cared for him at home—with much help from her angel daughter, Lorna and family—to the very end of his life.

A few years ago, on a visit to her home in east Tennessee, she told me that she had a dream about Dad just the night before. She smiled as she described how real the dream seemed and how good it was to have “her Ernest” there with her again. Death may have separated them for a time physically, but he will forever be “The Man of Her Dreams.”