She was a “survivor” if I ever met one. In the midst of rearing six children in the family, back in the days when it “just was not done”, her husband had an affair with another woman. The other woman decided that she was going to tell his family, so he went to her place and fatally shot her. Then he came home, wrote a note of apology for what he had done, and on that beautiful Saturday afternoon he used the same gun on himself. One of the six children, a thirteen-year-old daughter, heard a shot, ran out into the groves behind their house, and found her father lying dead.
The news was everywhere by the next morning. As people sometimes do, the neighbors chose to gossip. “Of course,” they “felt sorry” for what this lady was going through, losing her husband so tragically. But the family was now “shamed.”
In the same year, 1929, the stock market crashed, people were out of work, and this “shamed” family lost its prosperous sawmill business. Within a matter of a few months, the lady in my story had gone from being the wife of a successful business man to being a single mother of six, with no income, few possessions, and no friends.
I don’t know how long she stayed in town, but I don’t think it was very long before she took her six children, moved to a larger city, and did sewing for people until she saved up enough to buy a little twenty-foot square wooden building on a busy street. She then contacted a wholesale grocery company and opened up the “Lula Olive Grocery Store” in that little building. Working twelve hours a day, six days a week, without any other employees, she made enough to support the family, bought four other houses on the same street, and found the time to train her children to “live right, work hard, have fun, and be nice to people.” She set the example and made sure that they followed it. All six of them did, for their entire lives. She never re-married.
Thirty years later, she was still running the grocery store. It was 1963 and I was in college studying for the ministry. One Saturday morning I decided to go see her. I drove my 1951 Dodge Coronet (which she had practically given to me) out to her house for a visit. We talked about a lot of things, laughed a lot, and had ham sandwiches together for lunch. I remember that just before I left, she asked me, “What does the Bible say about the possibility of one who has committed suicide going to heaven?”
She didn’t know that I knew why she had asked me that question, but I’m sure that I knew. She had never stopped loving her husband, and she was hoping he had gone to a happy place. My answer seemed to give her comfort. I drove away, glad that I had taken this time to be with her.
She had not been sick that week, but the following Tuesday she walked home from the store, sat in a chair, asked for a glass of water and passed away. Her heart just quit beating. She was seventy-six.
I didn’t cry when she died. I didn’t need to. We had said everything that we needed to say just three days ago.
The thirteen-year-old girl that had found her father dead in the groves was my mother.
Whenever I begin to doubt whether I can make it, whether I can survive the trials of life, whether I can keep on going and loving and giving, I remind myself that Lula Olive’s blood runs through my veins. She was my grandmother. She was a hero to us all, and will never be forgotten as long as I live.
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