Easter Afternoon with Grandma Miller

Easter Eve

Jones Family Visit

A Day of Mixed Emotions

Hazel Amanda Moffitt passed away on March 1 at Raintree Manor.  Joe was with her at the time.  She was only there for about a week, after being moved from the hospital in White County where she had spent a few weeks.  Alzheimer's really took its toll on her for the last several months of her life.  There had been many difficult times as the disease progressed.  It was such a blessing that, in the end, she simply quit breathing.  There was no struggle, just a peaceful passing.  Her funeral was on March 5 at Bethlehem Church of Christ.  It was a horrible weather day.  Very cold and windy with heavy rains.  Even so, many friends and family braved the elements and attended, anyway.

After the burial, the family assembled at Opal's.  There was so much food there that so many people had prepared and brought.  After eating, I left to go to Mom's.  It was her 96th birthday.  The Whites dropped Joe, Holly, and Ella off on their way back to Knoxville.  Mom sent them off with some pinto beans she had prepared.  After they left, we took a few pictures.  She loved holding Baby Ella :)

Hazel Amanda Moffitt (b. 4-9-1924 - d. 3-1-2013)

(written by Joe)

I was with mom when she passed away.  She had been in the hospital for a couple of weeks and then in the nursing home at Raintree for a week.  She was in pitiful shape.  Death came as a blessing - for which I had been praying.  For most of the day she had been staring straight at the ceiling with no response to the presence of others, but breathing on her own.  I was by her bedside with my hand resting on her forearm.  I had leaned away, not touching her, just blankly watching TV when I realized that she had stopped breathing.  Then, it occurred to me that that for which I had prayed had come to pass and I was struck with the idea that she was gone.  There was a great sense of relief and an empty sense of loss at the same time.  I realized that once again in my life, things would never quite be what they had been in the past.

Mom was probably the least materialistic person I have ever known.  She did not value “stuff” and felt disposed to give away many things that I would have thought essential.  Extended family members would sometimes ask her for money and thought her generous for giving it to them; but, in reality she often felt put upon and taken advantage of.  Even the generous want to be treated fairly and generosity gives way to resentment when you feel taken advantage of.

Mom valued learning but always felt very unlearned.  She was required, by her father, to quit school in the 6^th grade.  But she spent her whole life reading and self-educating herself.  In recent years she would announce to visitors that it was time for her to go to bed (meaning, it was time for us to leave) even though it was only 6 p.m. or so.  Bedtime did not mean sleep time.  She wanted to retire to bed and read until 10 or 11.  She liked to read about travel (but she didn’t want to go anywhere) and she liked to read news magazines.  She also liked Readers Digest because of its great variety.

She was very courageous in physical ways but very intimidated by people she thought above her in social class.  She was self-conscious in social settings and avoided them in every way she could.  The exception to that would be her friends from her childhood.  She liked to see them at church and in short community visits.  Any visit she made herself was always very short.  Upon arrival she quickly became anxious to leave and return to the comfortable surroundings of her own home and property.

She loved to raise and exchange flowers.  A favorite was Iris (which was a favorite of her mother).  But, she also loved many other flowers.  She particularly loved giving starts of them to others and also getting starts from others.

She did not like house work or cooking.  My childhood memories are of pinto beans and potatoes cooked early in the week and then warmed up for the rest of the week. My adult memories are that she wanted to be sure you were not at her house at meal time.  I don’t know if she was insecure about cooking or just hated to do it.  

She liked working outside in her vegetable garden.  A favorite was growing a variety of pole beans called “cut-shorts”.  It is a short bean pod that is also my favorite of the green beans.  But, she was very careful to keep her seeds of this bean and share them sparingly with others.  In earlier years she used to can a lot of them as well as pickled beets, kraut, blackberries, huckleberries, soup mixtures, jams and jellies.

Being the oldest comes with certain privileges that the rest of the siblings don’t get.  For one thing, I was an only child for a couple of years.  Mom used to say I had the “prettiest little fat white legs”.  Only a mother would think fat white legs were “pretty”.  Mom used to work with me to get me ready for school.  Reading material was in short supply but some of the older cousins had some primary grades text books and mom brought them to our house.  In those days you bought your own text books for elementary grades just as you do for college now.  With those books she taught me to read before I started school.  There is a line from the poem “The Reading Mother” that has often come to my mind throughout the years.  It goes “…richer than me, you can never be, for I had a mother, who read to me”.

My memories of Mom will not be of Alzheimer’s disease or of days with back pain.  They will be a young woman who played ball with us and sang songs like “I Want to Be A Cowboy’s Sweetheart”.  She liked listening to the “Grand Ole Opry” before we had TV and then watching music shows of all sorts afterwards.  She liked walks in the woods, gathering honeysuckle bouquets (the bushes, not the vines), and digging good “flower dirt” from rotted wood areas.  She was a good woman whose life spanned the days from the depression to well into the 21^st century.  She was more at home in the world of her youth, but then, aren’t we all!