A Fantastic Love

Last June after my Grandmothers memorial service my aunts and mother complied a book of family history for all the cousins.

Although my mom had told me about the book, today was the first time I actually saw it.

There were pictures from the late 1800's, men with what appears to be fur protruding from the sides their faces in odd patterns, women with blank stark stares.

"This guy had five wives, a widower five times" my mother said about a photo of a particularly unattractive man.

Ok, or a murder.

"Maybe they died to get away from him," I suggested.

Then there were the letters, most of which were from my Great Great Grandfather, Henry Milner and then after his untimely death my Great Great Grandmother, Jessie Milner.

A year after Henry died Jessie followed resulting in my Great Grandmother and her five siblings, including an 18 month old, becoming orphaned.

On the prompting of my Henry's parents the family moved away from the homestead in Nebraska to try and farm in Kansas.

Apparently, it didn't go so well.

Henry's letters are all business, the cost of seed, a calf he had to sell for $3.00.

At some point the family decided to move back to Nebraska, it was on this trip Henry became ill and died.

"Dear Mother and Family-It is with grief that I write you the sad news of Henry's death. Oh my God, how can I ever live through this trouble..." she writes.

And it only gets worse.

She couldn't afford to feed her horses so she allowed a man to work them for food.

"I will have to take my horses away from that man...I will live on corn bread and water before I will let anyone work my horses to death."

Great.

Her husband died leaving with with 6 children "alone among strangers". In turn, she died leaving her six children orphaned among those same strangers, including Bessie the mother of my maternal Grandfather.

Bessie married my Great Grandfather, Bert Adams, a difficult and harsh man, and had three sons she adored.

Her oldest Paul was killed in World War II, and my Grandfather, Dwight, died of renal failure at age 44, so life didn't really get any easier for Grandma Bessie.

Yet she wasn't angry or bitter, she was kind and hopeful, at least that is the way I remember her.

I have vivid memory of my Great Grandmother and stories of her childhood on the Kansas Prairie.

She died in 1983 at the age of 96.

At the end of the book was a photograph of my Grandparents, Dwight and Margaret, engaged in a passionate kiss. He is holding her tight against his body, his lips planted squarely on her mouth, her hand on his face.

"They were so in love. They loved each other that way until the day he died," my mother said.

A fantastic love is what it was.

I put it on my desk so I can see it everyday.

Sometime life hands you something and it makes you rethink who you are- the two people in the romantic embrace are my Grandparents- of this I am heir.