Mary has had a great deal of loss in her life, yet has found a way to deal with the loss and lead a very happy life in spite of her difficult challenges. She has lost five children and two husbands over the last eighty-plus years.
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My story begins in December of 1941. I was 11 ½ years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. My family had been to the park, had bought hamburgers, and my brother and I played. Coming home, my parents had the car radio on. It was about bombs. At 11 ½ years old, you know the world is big but you don’t know the proximity of it. I was frightened and I believe my parents were frightened because they didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. We lived in Brownwood, Texas. My dad was a school superintendent. My mother had taught school until I came into the world and I had a younger brother, so she stayed home but she was never happy staying home. She missed teaching.
During the war years I lost two grandmothers and a grandfather. My grandfather had throat cancer and it was horrible looking because it was on the exterior. My mother would take me to see him and it was not a pretty sight.
Then a neighbor, the father of one my best friends, who was retired and was driving a truck for a camp nearby. He was doing his war effort by driving this truck, and he was hit and killed. This was so traumatic because the families were close and would get together a lot of times for meals at night.
Also, one of the neighbor boys that I had had a crush on most of my life because I thought he was the best looking thing I’d ever seen, was in the Death March at Hiroshima. (?) I grieved over all of these people and it made me so frightened of death. I was very fearful.
Then I married and my second child was born in 1953. She had a bad heart and she only lived one day. I nearly had a nervous breakdown over it.
A neighbor, who is still a good friend, and I started going to Bud Mosier’s Today Church for classes and also to the Unity Church. I can’t remember the name of the minister, but he’d been in the movies and was extremely dynamic. Both of our husbands thought it was terrible. Neither of them went to church, but we were not allowed to take our children. We were in the Christian church, Disciples of Christ Church and she my friend was in the Presbyterian Church. Both boys said we couldn’t go because it was a cult. So we would go at night. Both of them traveled so they didn’t know what we were doing and we really did enjoy everything. By 1967, I told my husband that I didn’t care what he thought and that I was going to the Today Church or the other one. They were both Unity.
It just changed my whole world when I walked in the first time it was like I had found a home. You hear that a lot. It really did affect me that way. I took a lot of classes and saw a lot people. In the mid 1960’s I heard Ernest Holmes speak. I heard James Dillet Freeman twice, and Ram Dass, when he got back from India. He was very motivating. There were a lot of interesting people and it was a whole new way of life for me.
I don’t know why in my life deaths have come all at one time. My first husband and I were what I would call happy until we took in a cousin of my husband’s. Her husband had died from injuries from World War II, and she was a bad alcoholic. She went in to take a nap one Sunday and died, at 38 years of age. So we took in her children, three girls.
My first husband was an engineer and made good money but he spent more than he made. Instead of saying, “Quit doing this!”, I would work, and worked all those years. He started running around. He travelled and I wasn’t aware of it until nearly the end of our marriage. I found about it and it was a bad time. He had become ill, he had a rare heart disease, and he died in January 1969.
I had all the kids. My son had been a terrible problem. He was the oldest. I think he was bipolar but then they didn’t know was bipolar was. He would be so excited about everything or in the depths of depression and would try to commit suicide. He tried so many times. He finally managed to. In 1982, my dad dropped dead of a heart attack. I was really a daddy’s girl, so that was especially hard and five days later my son committed suicide. Then a year later, the oldest girl, we don’t know if it was suicide or not, she had become a bad alcoholic and she was in a car accident and died. And then another year later, Dandy, the youngest one died. She had had a nervous breakdown and she was on drugs and took too many and died.
Then, George’s son who was a psychologist here in town, had been in a car accident and was a paraplegic and he dropped dead of a heart attack. His heart had been affected but you would never have expected it because he was only 42.
Out of eight children I have three living. But by the time I lost the second group, I could think how blessed I was to have had them in my life. I had a completely different take on it and knew that it was just part of life. When my husband died in 2001, my sister-in-law had died in August and then 9-11 came and then he died at Thanksgiving. That was a tough year. We had such a good marriage it was really hard. But I was so thankful. My whole perspective on life had just completely changed.
I am so grateful to Unity. It helped me cope with my girls growing up. Taking the three in, there were lots of problems. Unity helped me so much with my life.
How has your life been changed as a result of your ordeal?
I learned a whole new perspective about death.
What would you advise another facing similar circumstances based on what you have learned?
My advice to others dealing with loss and death is to think of the good things and good times that happened having those you have lost in your life. It’s such a difference seeing it this way.
