Hall Cemetery | Becoming is Superior to Being

Mother, Grandmother, Great-Grandmother, Agnes.

Willie Agnes Poe passed away (September 8, 2006) after three months of fighting post-surgery infection. During the last few weeks of Mother’s life, she shared stories of her childhood and often talked about playing with her close childhood friend, Fern. (They remained close throughout life.)

“We had so much fun playing in the cemetery — Can you take me back to the cemetery on the hill?’ she would ask. “I can see the man in black with a big black dog,” she would go on.

In her last days, the man in black visited her. As we were talking, she looked straight ahead, “…see him, he is here! Don’t you see him?” Then she would turn and ask, “Can you bring me a big black dog? I want a big dog! Can you get one for me?”

“Yes, we can,” would be my reply, We were making arrangements for Jill to bring one of their black labs by for Mother, just two days before she passed on.

On August 26, 2012, the family gathered in The Woodlands to celebrate the life of Willie Agnes Poe, which involved a brunch at Cru’ Wine Bar and a gathering at the pedestrian bridge over Grogan’s Mill Road.

After moving to The Woodlands in the mid-1980’s, Mother would walk the trails from her Grogan’s Landing apartment, which included the pedestrian bridge in a six-mile walk around the TPC golf course. Over time, Mother became functionally blind, limiting the trail walking, but not her walking. Early each morning she would spend a couple of hours walking back and forth over the pedestrian bridge. Our gathering at the bridge ended with a symbolic walk over Agnes’ bridge.

Why this celebration now? Because Mother had donated her body to the Texas Medical Center after her death, we didn’t have a family gathering to celebrate her life. It was our understanding that Mother’s ashes would be sent to us 2-3 years after her death. As it turned out, we didn’t receive her ashes till this past May.

Hall Cemetery

Several months after Mother’s death we got word that her brother, J.C. had died. I knew immediately we were going to Alabama. How I know just how important it was to bring closure to the Mother’s life. While in Alabama, Joy and I made a point of going to Lincoln, then two miles out to the country church and cemetery in Refuge. She was always at her happiest when talking about her childhood in Alabama, even more so during her last days with us. She always wanted to go back but knew she would only be able to in her vision of those childhood memories. It doesn’t go unnoted that with the importance of Hall Cemetery in Refuge, Alabama, Mother didn’t desire to be buried there. For her, a higher priority was to give her body to medicine.

While visiting Hall Cemetery, I wanted so to turn around and see two little girls playing in the cemetery on the hill – to see the man in black with the big dog – to hear them laughing, and see the joy when the big dog came running to the children. Instead, Joy and I walked silently, on this sunny fall morning through the small cemetery on the hill, which now represents the burial-place of the last surviving member of the Confederate army. As fate would have it, as we walked through Hall Cemetery, a black dog appeared.

By making the journey to Hall Cemetery, I have for my life captured the feeling of two little girls laughing and playing in a world that never vanished from Mother’s vision of happiness. Real or not, it was real for her – now it is real for me, and I might add, Joy.

kenne

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A Celebration Of Life

“When the child was a child, it didn’t know

It was a child

Everything for it was filled with life and all life was one

When the child, when the child

The child, child, child, child, child

And on and on and on and on, etc. And onward

With a sense of wonder

Upon the highest hill. Upon the highest hill

When the child was a child

Are you there

Shassas, shassas

Up on a highest hill

When the child was a child, was a child, was a child

Was a child, was a child, was a child, etc.

… and it’s still quivering there today”

from, Song of Being A Child

Music by Van Morrison, Words by Peter Handke

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Theologians may debate the right or wrong of cremation, but such an academic debate means nothing in the end, it’s an individual’s choice.

Mother, an avid reader and student of the Bible, grew up in a conservative Christian family in rural northern Alabama. Among her many stories of her childhood, which she titled, “the little girl from Alabama,” was going to funeral services, during which the children would be outside the church playing in the cemetery across the road. Even near her death in 2006, she talked about Hall Cemetery in Lincoln, Talladega County, Alabama. However, the story near her death was not of a little girl playing in the cemetery, but of a black dog and a man in a black suit walking in Hall Cemetery.

Although one might think Willie Agnes Poe (Salter) was fixated on cemeteries and therefore being laid to rest in one, this very holy woman had made plans for her body to be donated to medical science — the Texas Medical Center in Houston Texas, after which her body would be cremated.

In the end, her affairs were very organized, my only responsibility was to see that they were carried out. The one thing neither of us expected was that it would be almost six years before we would receive her ashes. On May 23, 2012 (my brother Tom’s birthday), we received her ashes.

With all her planning, the one detail she didn’t stipulate was what she wanted done with her ashes. There are several possibilities, from which I will be receiving family advice. But for now, her ashes are in the William K. Turner Sacred Raka Urn we ordered from Sacred Ways. (I can hear her now, “You shouldn’t have spent the money!”)

Chase Morris & Great-Grandma Agnes — Image by kenne