Memorial Day and Memory Books

I wonder if funeral homes still have those Memory Books at the door for people to sign. I know Jackie Einstein had a couple of books—one for names and addresses, the other for messages anyone wanted to leave to her and the rest of Walter’s family. I also know that there are virtual books for people at a distance to sign and leave messages. I’ve come to appreciate the importance of these artifacts.

Holidays prompt me to think about the old days, which prompts me to rummage around in my boxes of pictures and keepsakes. This rummaging caused me to find a Memory Book from Tapp Funeral Home in Providence, Kentucky, dated 1954.

My oldest sister, Retha Dare, was born in 1927 and passed away in September, 1954. She died in childbirth, delivering her fifth child. I was ten years old at the time and remember the occasion vividly. She was so young. After her fourth child she was told she should not have any more children; to do so would almost certainly endanger her own life and the life of the child. I remember being at her house frequently over the years. I was a nosy boy; still am. I remember seeing a sort of workbook filled with pictures and charts; she was trying to calculate her menstrual cycles. I now feel inextricable pain at what she must have gone through. It was 1954. We knew almost nothing about birth control. She got pregnant. She died. Fortunately her child lived. But five children, the oldest being 10 (10 days older than I), were left without a mother. They scattered to the wind.

As wrenching and anger provoking as this is,  given recent arguments about birth control and women’s choice, that’s not what I’m wondering about right now. It’s the Memory Book that has captured my imagination. And of course, given my mother’s penchant for taking pictures of folks, tucked away in the back of the book I found a picture negative of my sister in the casket. Blew my mind.

I’m looking at the names and remembering the people filing in, viewing my sister, sitting quietly for awhile, going out back to smoke, talking quietly, paying their respects to my family. Their names, faces, and voices pop out at me like old black and white movies: Nellie Rinehammer, Amanthus Lloyd, Mason Guess, Sidney Webb, Lindy Cullen, Strauther Harvey, Doy Lovan, Pearl Lovan, Grady Lovan (my grandmother) Virginia Clevenger, Don Ferguson, Les Gobin,  Teenie Stevens, Curtis Yarbrough, and on and on and on.

These faded signatures offer a testament to the fact that these people existed in that place at that time to mark the passing of my sister.

As an old man, I’ve come to love small towns, especially that small town of Providence, Kentucky, and especially as it exists, fixed in my memory, as jogged by such things as 60-year-old Memory Books.