Light as a feather, free as a bird

Today is the 50th anniversary of my Aunt Flora Myers’ death. Now why did that occur to me? There can’t be many more pointless exercises than observing a date of death, anyone’s death, when we have their lives to celebrate. But it did.

I wasn’t very old when Auntie died --- of multiple sclerosis --- and among the people who rank high on my list of those I would like to have known as an adult, at least as a teenager, she ranks high. Smart, funny, kind, a wicked wit sometimes --- I’ve heard her described as all of the above. But I remember only the kindness.

Mention Herbert Hoover, my dad used to say, and Auntie would spit fire. Mention FDR, and she would purr. I come from a long line of Democrats.

Flora Maude was born 21 August 1907 at home on the family farm along the New York Road in Benton Township and given a name so old-fashioned that now it sounds almost foreign. But there were reasons. Flora Toole was an old-maid teacher who taught Myers School, just up the road, and often boarded with my grandparents. She seems to have been a worthy model. Flora Myers, too, became a teacher.

Maude (Gatley) Dent was my grandmother’s stepmother --- and there were mixed feelings in the family about her. Great-grandfather Cash Dent --- gambler, carouser, hard drinker, a maker and loser of modest fortunes in northwest Iowa and Wyoming --- shaved off a few years when he married the much-younger Maude and everyone said, “aha!” Years later, when those years caught up with Cash and Maude gave him the boot, shipping him back from Oregon to the western slopes of the Big Horns to die. Everyone said, “See, we told you so.” But Maude was kind to my grandmother and Grandma appreciated that.

Auntie grew up on the Benton Township farm, attending first Myers School, then Chariton High School and its normal training program (with some supplemental coursework at what now is the University of Northern Iowa) --- and then she began to teach.

It was a hard life; something teachers nowadays wouldn’t think of putting up with. She taught many schools in Lucas and Clarke counties for very little money, based at her parents’ home. At first she rode horseback (was it old Flossie?) daily to and from nearby schools. When the schools were farther away, my dad drove her to the farm homes where she boarded during the week on Sunday afternoons, picked her up and brought her home on Friday evenings, year after year, mile after mile.

One of her best friends was my maternal aunt, Mae (Miller) Gibbany --- those two introduced their younger siblings --- my parents.

As the Depression settled in, it became progressively harder to find a school, but Auntie always did --- and I’ve been surprised over the years at how many people remembered her. Just this spring, corresponding with Hugh Wallace in New York --- I remember where he grew up just down the New York Road --- he informed me that Auntie had been a teacher of his at the old Oxford School in Lincoln Township.

When she was in her 30s, Auntie began to experience difficulty coordinating her movements. It was a disorder that puzzled local physicians, although multiple sclerosis eventually was diagnosed. But the diagnosis brought no relief, since physicians had no idea how to treat MS then (and it’s still a troublesome disorder that cannot be cured). My dad recalled countless painful trips to specialists --- to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., to University Hospitals in Iowa City, to Des Moines --- looking for hope. None came, although she was willingly subjected to every experimental (and sometimes painful) therapy that came along.

Finally, she became severely handicapped and housebound, then bedfast; and when it became clear that she needed constant and attentive care, she found a home in the big northeast bedroom upstairs at Cora White’s nursing home in Chariton. She died there on the 24th of May, 1958.

So I’d like to launch a little celebration of Auntie’s life here on the 50th year to the day after she left us. Brave and bright, never complaining, finding joy in the simplest of things (including me, her only nephew), she touched many lives in her own relatively short one, then lifted off and floated away --- free as a bird, light as a feather, no longer burdened by a body that had betrayed her. Blessed be.