On homes and grief, life and loss

In a joking way I have always asserted that it would take an act of God or nature for our family to move from this little house in which we have known love, good health, security, and happiness these many years.

Now we've sold our family home, and I can only say that, in a way, I came to the decision because of an act of God.

Both of my grandfathers passed away this late spring and summer, and I experienced a real emotional crisis. As my extended family's loss began to sink in, I felt so badly for my husband who had lost all of his grandparents in the past couple decades, his paternal grandfather before we were even a couple. Losing our grandparents feels like an indelible marker on the road of life: You Are HERE. 

And I just want my grandpas back. It was a comfort to know they were in the world even though I spent so much of my life hundreds of miles away from them.

I look back to when I was a teenager and recall how very unhappy I was to be moving from Tennessee to Idaho. And now? I earnestly thank God for that time I had with my grandparents in Idaho, camping, talking, shopping, eating meals, taking walks, that I never would have had if my parents and I had stayed in that beloved home in Tennessee so far from extended family.

My generous husband flew me up late June for what turned out to be a brutal weekend in which I attended my paternal grandfather's memorial service on Saturday and then my maternal grandfather's funeral on the following Monday. The true solace of those few days was the raw beauty found in mourning with family - some of whom I had seen seldom or never actually met before - in telling stories of Papa and Grandpa for the benefit of each other, singing their favorite songs, and listening reverently as "Taps" was played in the quiet of verdant cemeteries for each by an Honor Guard sent to pay tribute to their military service in WWII.

(I will never forget the beautiful image of my mother, her sister, and three brothers standing in a line before their dad's coffin, hand joined in the solidarity of grief.)

Still, emotions ran high during conversation, company was kept late and sleep was elusive, and the evening before my Grandfather Asher's funeral, my sister and I had a vital but highly charged conversation that drained both of us further. (Yet I know Grandpa, who undoubtedly had many difficult family discussions in his life, would have been proud of us for clearing the air.)

When I got home 4th of July, I felt I looked about 50 after sleeping fitfully and eating poorly and balling my eyes out on multiple occasions. In the car ride home from the airport, I sprang the news on my husband that, after talking with my brother and parents about my feelings, I wanted to sell the house. Then I balled again in his arms when I saw that he and Berto had refinished my dining room table as a surprise.

Honestly, I don't know what I've done, why I've done it, or what I've gotten us in to. In large part the idea of selling this house was a way to avoid succumbing to depression in the wake of such a huge loss, a loss that felt so much heavier, because Grandmama Asher, to whom I was very close as a young woman, passed away when my youngest, Daniel, was only six months old.

I thank God for the time I had in my Grandparents Asher's house. I always felt at home there, loved, well cared for, and I admit that my memories of being in their large, rambling home with its spacious yard in a small town made me long to give my family something like it now that both of them are gone - a sort of legacy of the home they created for their grandchildren to visit.

So I have taken a leap of grief and faith and said goodbye to the small but only home my family has ever known since our oldest, Berto, was a mere babe in arms.

Over the years I thought on and off about it whenever our 1240 square foot house felt overwhelmed by our family's activities, but something about the realization of the life marker that clearly states "You Are HERE" gave me an attitude of now or never, leap or sigh. 

I can only hope we find a home that reminds me of all the love and joy I knew in my grandparents' houses.

Our beloved Grandpa and me

The home my grandparents made

Tuesday night I lay awake in bed thinking about how strange it would be to enter my grandparents' house and neither of them be there.

And then I cried silently while my husband slept next to me, the tears matting my hair and dribbling into my ears.

I love Grandpa and Grandmama's house in that small Idaho town where both my parents spent years of their childhood. Even though my grandparents didn't acquire that house until I was a teenager, it's the one I associate most with their presence. And so to be in it, and they be absent, will be very sad.

It's a fine, old two-story home, partitioned into many rooms that have changed slowly over the years, but those rooms always seemed to be brimming with family, with life, and with small, energetic dogs who followed my grandfather around. How many of our clan have spent several nights or even years under the same roof as our patriarch and matriarch in their welcoming home where the coffee and conversation flowed freely?

In the summers of my teenage years, I used to spend the night often - even bringing along my best friend Sarah - and loved the middle room upstairs with its window overlooking a slice of the front yard and its enormous pine trees. I loved Grandmama's fine garden to the back of the garage, that garden she seemed to call forth effortlessly, though I know she must have labored in it continually. I have good memories of sitting on the front porch with her, snapping green beans from that verdant plot into huge bowls.

I loved Grandmama's colorful flower borders by the front walkway, now gone.

...and the raised flower bed and outdoor seating area in back that Grandpa built

...the knickknacks, multiple prints of famous artwork, and abundant furnishings that my Aunt Stephie helped to collect, mostly from yard sales

and the spacious park at the end of the street where Grandmama and I used to walk before stopping in a little cafe to get smoothies or coffee.

Just last October I was in that house, and as usual an abundance of family was there - some I did not expect to but was overjoyed to see - and a new little dog whom I had not met, and the coffee percolated constantly in an industrial-sized coffee machine.

My Grandmama died more than six years ago, but I sat with Grandpa out back beneath the awning he had made as he told stories about his wife, including all the classic ones about how jealous she could be, once telling a waitress to "Get your damn hands off my man!" I love those stories, because I am a jealous woman myself, and they explain where I got it from.

Grandpa was starting to forget things, and there were so many people around, and so he asked me which one I was. I told him I was Hillary, nicknamed Hoodoo, and I reminded him of the time I lived with him and Grandmama for a brief time in Boise after my family moved back to Idaho from Tennessee and how I disliked my new school so much  - built like a prison with slivers for windows! - and was so slow getting up and ready for it that Grandpa, who loved to tease, called my walk to the bus stop (or ride if I were running late) the Hoodoo Trail of Tears.

His eyes lit up with the memory, and he exclaimed, "That's right!" and chuckled afresh.  (It was a story he retold every time I saw him, but I had to tell it this last time.)

On Tuesday I found out Grandpa had passed away, not even a month after we lost my Grandfather Hylton. Our family's grief is compounded. My mom and dad have each lost a parent. My siblings and I have lost both our grandpas. It's a summer for grieving.

I won't hear Grandpa call me Hoodoo again or see that tell-tale twinkle in his eye or hear him chuckle at his own stories.

I won't get another chance to ask him about his service in WWII or the crazy adventures of his unusual childhood.

And I am so sad and heartbroken for my darling mother, his daughter.

But I am sure that whenever we may enter that house again, even while now missing both Grandpa and Grandmama terribly and feeling their absence keenly, it will still be brimming with family and love.

In Memoriam: Grandpa Hylton

Memorial Day will be one of many days for my family to remember the man who was my grandfather, C. Lee Hylton, in the years to come. He was a veteran of WWII who joined the Navy near the end of the war when he was just 16. In my grandfather's own words, he was a "hillbilly boy" who had "no whiskers yet, just a wild ambition with a lack of wisdom".

He passed away recently just after Memorial Day on May 30, 2017.

One of his many grandchildren and great grandchildren, I am the granddaughter he called "Tank" when she was an infant because of her chubbiness, and dubbed "Hildy Bee" in her teenage and adult years. I can still hear the way he used to say, "Well, Hildy Bee..." in his gentle, joking way. I can hear his joyful, subtle laugh, a laugh I heard often when I took my own children to visit him. It is my great pleasure and privilege to write about the man who was my Grandfather Hylton.

Grandpa traveled the Pacific with the Navy, but most of his life was spent in Idaho's small towns and wilderness areas.

He was working as a shepherd on West Mountain when he met my grandmother, Alverna, a book keeper in a small store in nearby Council, Idaho where his older sister was a clerk. They married in 1948. Little did Grandma know then that her husband would soon become a different sort of shepherd and that his life's work was to have a far greater impact even than service to his country.

His vocation came to him quite unexpectedly, and it began with a conviction that struck his heart like lightning.

Papa, as many in our family called him, labored in an auto body shop repairing the damaged steel frames of wrecked cars after he and Nana married. He was a drinker in those first years of marriage and child rearing -  not a habitual one, but a man who drank to excess when, as my Grandma put it, "the wrong friend came around".

One of those errant friends worked with my grandfather. As they were leaving the shop one day, he turned to Papa and said out of the blue, "You know, if we don't change our ways, we're both going to hell."

That very next Sunday, Grandpa took his family to church. When the altar call came for people to confess their sins and offer their hearts to Christ, my grandmother handed their baby son to Papa and hurried to the altar to kneel. He was mad that Nana beat him to the punch. The following Sunday it was Grandpa's turn to give his heart to the Lord. That was the year 1952.

Reverend C. Lee Hylton

Two years later they were headed to Los Angeles Bible School. Grandpa and Grandma had saved their money, so that Papa could train to become a pastor.

Upon their return to Idaho, they were given several small churches one after another, called "missionary churches", as their little ones grew up. Preaching and extravagant living rarely go together; it always seems incongruous when they do. Papa did not make much from doing the work of God, so he painted houses during the week, no doubt mulling over the Word of God and his sermons for the coming Sunday with each rhythmic brushstroke.

Though my grandfather dedicated years of his life to shepherding churches in Idaho, what really ignited him was traveling as an evangelist, going to other congregations to preach each night of the week in order to revive the faith of communities. One of his revivals lasted five weeks! Papa even brought his family here to the towns around Phoenix in his evangelical mission.

A favorite sermon to deliver, one that he preached several times over the years according to my dad, was born of his experiences as a shepherd on West Mountain. My grandfather encountered many a mountain stream while herding sheep. Those tributaries in Idaho are beautiful, pouring forth cold, clear water from the heights. But they sometimes become clogged with the debris of nature, mud and stones and fallen pine branches. When Papa saw such diminished watercourses, he knelt to scoop out the detritus from their chilly, trickling water until they rushed again through the lush mountain meadows as they were meant to do. This was an allegory for what we must routinely do in our relationship with our Maker, Papa asserted: we must remove the litter to receive the rush of grace and love that God so freely and mercifully gives each day.

I didn't get to spend much of my childhood with my grandparents. They were in Idaho, and we were in Tennessee. But I knew my grandpa as a man short of stature but full of fire when he delivered a sermon, a man who always wore weathered cowboy boots - something I loved about him. And he was a man who had a strong voice for hymns as well as preaching, one who was never ashamed to sing praises to the Lord as his wife skillfully played the organ. One of his favorite hymns was "Down From His Glory".



When my Aunt Cheryl told me how Grandpa used to love to sing that song, and I looked it up, I could hear my Grandpa's fine voice and see his face tilted just so as he sang it in the small New Plymouth, Idaho church where I heard him preach as a teenager.

What is Grandpa's legacy? Every one of his three sons has served as a pastor and each of his two daughters married one. They hold fast to their faith, regularly work to share it with others using their unique talents and have passed it on to their own children. His grandchildren know how their Papa praised and loved the One who came down from His glory to win all our souls, the One Who once spoke to and changed Grandpa's heart through the blunt words of a friend.

That man's name is Jesus, and He has now another stalwart servant in His loving arms for all eternity.

Short - World Series Cardinals

My husband and son are rooting for the Texas Rangers to win the World Series. I don't have anything against them really. I like Texas in general, but my heart roots for the St. Louis Cardinals, despite the fact that I refuse to watch the games. I find baseball on TV very boring, but I still stand beside the Cardinals in spirit.

The reason I stand with St, Louis is akin to the reason why I like the Miami Dolphins football team. I loved them because my big brother loved them, and I still have stout feelings for that team despite the fact that they have no Dan Marino anymore and I rarely get their games on TV here in Arizona. Nevertheless, my hatred for the Dallas Cowboys is a legacy of my loyalty to Miami, and it will always persist.

With St. Louis, the history is longer. My dad has always rooted for St. Louis. Maybe he inherited it from his dad, for he often told us kids how much our grandfather loved baseball (I'm pretty sure that's why my brother signed up for little league all those years). I also know that my grandfather's dad moved from Missouri to Idaho as a young man.

And I have good memories with my own immediate family tied to Missouri, tied to its baseball team. On all the trips west from Tennessee to Idaho to visit relatives as a child, we passed through St. Louis. The St. Louis arch wasn't just "the Gateway to the West", it was our gateway to the west, to our extended family, to my parents' beginnings. We always stopped. I have memories of the arch growing in the horizon of the front dashboard, of looking up at the great curve of the arch as I stood on the pavement below, of the brown and broad Mississippi River with its slow barges, of my dad perusing all the Cardinals baseball memorabilia in the souvenir shop at the feet of the huge structure.

But to really cement the history and my loyalty is the recollection of all the nights my family spent outside on humid summer evenings or chill autumn nights listening to baseball games on the car radio. I don't know how the tradition started. Maybe that was during the period when we had no TV, maybe Dad went to the radio to catch all the games not shown on TV, or perhaps he simply preferred the experience of sitting and listening beneath the open sky. Sports broadcasters, good ones at least, can make the game a carnival for the ears with their phrasing.

On those outdoor baseball nights, Dad and Mom snuggled up together in the car, windows rolled down to let in the breeze. We kids were allowed to drag ourselves and our blankets onto the hood of the old sedan. There we stretched out to watch the stars, stare at the moon. The game on the car stereo was merely a pleasant background hum for our stargazing, sibling poking and laughter. Only occasionally did Dad shush us or punctuate the broadcaster's words with exclamations of delight or disgust. Sometimes there was the excited tempo of his encouragement as he leaned forward toward the dashboard, momentarily drawing his arm away from my mother's shoulder as he prodded his team - "C'mon, C'mon, C'mon..."

Man, I'm grateful for those memories. They make you feel like you come from somewhere. I come from a man who loved the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. That man came from a man who loved baseball. My grandfather came from a man who once had a farm in Missouri. And so, even though I won't watch a single game, I know where I stand and who I'm rooting for in this World Series.