He Was Probably Checking on His Tomatoes (AND) Getting Firewood

About six weeks ago I was able to have a weekend visit with my cousin, Laura. Having not seen her in about three years, it was a wonderful time of re-connecting.

On Saturday evening she made us a Valentine’s Day Dinner (this was February 12 and it was just her and I together that day) of steak, shrimp and salad. We sat around the table and then moved to the sofa, talking late into the evening.

At one point we were talking about our individual memories of some family events. My Grandfather Luther’s death in March 1972, and also my father’s death in May 1979.

Tonight (I started writing this piece on Friday, February 25) I was just outside working in my early spring gardens – thirty-eight degrees and I was moving some dirt and mushroom soil and planted my first row of snow peas.

I was thinking about different things while outside, and in particular, the two shared recollections of these two events by both her and myself.

Perspectives (and factual details) can be quite interesting. I got to thinking about the story of the blind men and the elephant. One man feels its trunk and thinks it is a snake, and the other feels its tusk and thinks it is an antelope. Or something along those lines. On quick search I am sure I have the details wrong!

Laura and I were talking about many things

from long ago – not just family deaths.

But, in the course of reminiscing about older times,

my grandfather’s funeral was mentioned,

as it was the first time either of us had seen a dead body.

Our memories of the viewing (once we were together at this March 1972 event) were pretty identical. But I told her of my memories before her arrival to the funeral parlor. I was in fourth grade and she would have been in sixth grade.

It was night time, of course (viewings always seem to be held in the evenings, it seems), and I can still clearly picture in my mind’s eye arriving from Delaware (or maybe we were already in Frederick or Boonsboro earlier that day) and parking on the side of the old Bast Funeral Home which was in a house then, in town. I can’t say for sure where we parked but I can recall coming through the main door with my parents, and the viewing was to the immediate left, in my mind’s spatial eye.

I imagine my mother had “prepped” me in probably some bizarre way – as she did with most things – both big and small.

I can even recall being coached by her on how to smile for my first grade picture – for what seemed to me hours in our living room, practicing in a mirror. I was missing teeth and she didn’t want me to flash some “cheesy grin.” She wanted me to keep my lips closed, but still smile.

I think I succeeded in achieving this

pained look of pleasant neutrality.

I don’t ever recall pre-coaching my sons for a school photo. That is the photographer’s job, and I’m sure her focus on my every little thing added to my sense of self-consciousness and even shame. I not only had a missing tooth, I had a bad cavity in one of my front teeth. I’m sure she achieved my self-impression that I might look like some shameful jack-o-lantern before I could even have associated that image.

So, from the moment we walked into that funeral parlor, I sensed something unusual was happening. The crowd of people, the hushed low murmur of voices, the relatives greetings us – people I didn’t really know too well, and, the smell…

Scents are very powerful in our memories.

We all know that pungent scent of many, many flowers

in an enclosed room, mixed with other perfumes

that people both living and dead may be anointed with.

But then, there was that moment when we walked from the entry into the room and my eyes fixed on the casket, off in the left corner.

Surely it was surrounded by flowers, but I can still see in my mind’s eye my grandfather’s waxen face and still body in the most unnatural situation. Though I didn’t know him well and only saw him perhaps once a year, he had a striking appearance in some ways to my father and uncles.

I remember becoming upset and crying, or something, I was terrified.

I imagine my mother tried to control my emotions and responses in some way, but it was my father I recall taking me out of the room – perhaps even outside – and talking with me.

And then we went back in.

I kind of recall perhaps he took me over to the casket; while I’m not sure, I think I got more comfortable in the situation and was mingling in the main room for about ten minutes before my cousin, Laura, showed up.

I recall immediately feeling excitement, relief and a change of focus. She and I must have been able to slip out of the crowd and that main room – together.

Because we both clearly recall our exploration of this funeral home and wandering through it. Laura said there were adjoined rooms that went all the way back. I just recall wandering into some other room with her and seeing another casket with a young man in it, draped with a US flag.

I remember Laura said, “He must have died in Vietnam.”

At one point in our recent visit, Laura said my grandfather had gone out to check on his tomatoes and had the massive heart attack, collapsing in the space between their log house side door to the kitchen and the root cellar outbuilding.

I recall very well the sidewalk between those two places. This photo I found in an album shows my Grandmother Orpha standing in that exact area.

Then I said to Laura, “I thought he went out for firewood and collapsed. And it was night time and Grandmother Slifer had run up to the little Poffenberger’s store because they never owned a telephone, to call for help.”

Laura said she thought it was in the morning.

She said she came home from school and there was a note that her mom was up at the homeplace, that Grandpap had died, and she would soon be home. She remembers her mom coming back and having to tell her father (my father’s brother), that his father had died. He had been at work all day and again, communications were not very easy, as they are today. He was a brick layer and I suppose phone access was not always possible.

I told Laura I thought it happened at night time.

And I asked, “Why would he have been checking tomatoes in March.” (Ha…at that point, I thought I was making a good point…but…it wasn’t like it mattered!)

Then Laura said, “Well, he probably had seedlings started in that root cellar.”

I said, “Yes, that would make sense.” Then in thinking more, I said, “I remember my father getting the phone call at night time and hearing him not saying a whole lot, just brief acknowledgements to whomever called, as he listened, and I heard him ask a few questions about funeral plans, perhaps.”

So I realized I assumed my Grandfather Luther died at night, getting firewood in March, since the call came at night time. All these years I assumed that we were contacted at night, immediately after it happened. But, I was too young to recall for sure any sequence or details, only that the call came at night when my father was home from work.

Together, Laura and I reasoned that he probably went out to

check the tomatoes, early in the morning as farmers would,

and then grabbed some firewood to head back into their home,

and fell dead.

Sometimes, perspectives can be that two things are true at the same time. As in this case, there didn’t need to be an either/or as in my Grandfather went out to check on tomatoes or he went outside for firewood. Both accounts could be harmonized.

Interestingly I remembered the more visceral elements such as carrying heavy firewood and collapsing (and perhaps because conversation in my home revolved around this somehow or it is what I heard or was told) and Laura remembered hearing that he had gone out to check tomatoes. She lived within five miles of them. I lived about 125 miles away.

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Back around 2014 I visited with the people who now own my Grandparents property in Rohreresville, Maryland – they knew our family and when I knocked and identified myself as Rodney’s daughter, they knew who I was. I did not know that the Dunlap’s prior to that meeting.

They took me, Zach and my former husband through the house, showing us how they had remodeled parts of the log framed home, and we peeked at the addition and walked around the property, saw the original hoop hen house my Uncle Donald had built as a teenager, which now held lawn tractors, and we saw some very old trees that still stood.

Mr. Dunlap told use that Luther could be seen hoeing corn by hand out in his gardens when he was 80. He died at 81. I believe they were neighbors further down that road near this property.

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The other thing Laura mentioned was her recollection of her mother, my Aunt Virginia, being on the phone with me the night my father died and some of the things she remembers hearing her tell me. I told her about the preceeding week from the night my father had his heart attack Friday night May 4, 1979 and I heard my parents arguing through my bedroom wall, until the following Thursday May 10 when he passed away.

I also told her my recollections of the two trips her parents had made to Delaware during that week and my mother’s horrible behavior toward them. She did not know, on her end, some of those details.

I do not remember my aunt speaking to me on the phone that night, but I do recall some other interactions with a neighbor who came to console and talk with me. My mother had zero capacity to console me, and actually called the neighbor and told her that I needed to be committed to the state psych hospital (where my mother had actually been three years early) because I was “out of control.” Which of course, upset me even further.

I was extremely upset – given the very difficult and troubling details and circumstances, which is something for a Part II of this someday – and I was crying. I was days away from turning sixteen, and my father had died. The one who cared for me, and protected and tried his best to shield me from my psychotic mother. I do remember Mrs. Moore, the mother of a neighborhood friend my age, came to our house and sat in my bedroom with me.

She went in the bathroom, got a wet washcloth for my eyes,

and in about fifteen minutes or less, I had calmed down.

All I needed, apparently, was a wet wash cloth, and, a mother.

I think she told me to probably lock my bedroom door and stay away from my mother that night. Probably also that the next day she would be back.

I do recall lying awake and hearing my mother on the phone until midnight (he died around 8pm at a hospital in Philadelphia) contacting insurance companies and other people, informing them of the death of “Rodney Slifer.” As she called him, routinely. She wanted to get a jump start on things, I suppose.

The very short version of just why I was so upset that night (apart from my father’s death) was that my mother had refused to give the doctors her permission for emergency surgery earlier that evening. They had called around 5 pm – I can still remember the late afternoon May light and warm day, shining into the window or front door in my mind’s eye but perhaps I am creating this from the hundreds of times I saw that type of spring lighting in my childhood home, with a warm May afternoon and lilacs in bloom – and she insisted that they could not “touch him” until she found someone to transport her in person to Philadelphia because she had “full power-of-attorney over Rodney Slifer.”

I was hysterical, hearing the call and fully comprehending the gravity of the situation, even at that tender age.

I remember picking up the other phone line and begging the doctor to do whatever he could do – that I was giving my permission. This was Thursday, May 10, 1979 and I turned sixteen on May 16, 1979.

I also recall after we received the call that he had died on the operating table – of course they went ahead and attempted a catherization procedure which was a relatively new technique then – my mother was threatening a lawsuit on the phone and demanding they do a full autopsy even of my father’s brain. She wanted to know exactly why he died.

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I have the original autopsy report in an envelope. This past summer 2021 I had an appointment with a cardiologist (I have had irregular palpitations since at least college and every so often, especially as I age, it worries me, but my tests were fine) and I brought the report with me, for the first time intending to ask a cardiologist some things. I wanted her interpretation, and also to see if there was any relevant information for my own current healthcare, since I am now just seven years away from the age at which my father died.

She did this for me.

Basically, my father died not only of the heart attack that had happened May 4 (he didn’t receive medical care until Monday May 7) but massive organ failures due to fluid buildups. This cardiologist in Lancaster, PA looked to be in her mid 30’s and did not seem put-off by my request. She said she went into cardiology because her own father died of a heart attack while they were on vacation when she was younger.

But. Yeah.

I suppose my response the night of my father’s death warranted my mother’s threat to have me “committed” that night.

She was horrible that night, but I recall her putting on

her calm voice to call the neighbor.

My mother had a phrase she used often –

– it is just coming to mind as I write –

she would say to be “calm, cool and collected.”

She could literally be a raving maniac/psychotic in private and then pick up the phone to someone and instantly put on a calm voice to tell them that “I” was out of control.

All I really needed was a mother that night, and my friend Stacie’s mom came up, talked with me on my bed and calmed me down and gave me a wet washcloth. As I recall, Mrs. Moore’s own mother had died when she was pretty young.

When I think of this act – of giving me water that night – on a wet washcloth – I cannot help but think of the poem Gunga Din. Though not the same thing of course – this poem about a servant bringing water to soldiers comes to mind and one particular line – “catch a swig in hell from Gunga Din.”

I would have never known this poem but for Jim Croce’s recording of it.

It seems I was able to finish up this piece WAR ZONES AND GUNGA DIN two days after beginning this one, before being able today to return and edit this writing which was basically completed that Friday night, February 25…writing can be such a process…

I am not going to sanitize my writings about this situation(s). I’m going to name it what it was: It was a form of hell.

Too much for a young girl to bear, and the situation was about to get both much worse and much better at the same time. I will likely need Parts II, III, IV, V, VI, VII and more to fully tell my story…
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dad’s garden

rob bell

legacy

(Above) Photos of the old hoop-built hen house, inside and out, taken in 2014.