Too many deaths lately; too close

 

 

                Not two hours after I mailed a “Thinking of You” card telling him how much I appreciated him, I found out that Frank “Corky” Chenault had died. “Mr. Chenault,” younger than I, was my principal at Eastside Junior High during the 1980s. His and Linda Jo’s grandson and my granddaughter are in the same grade and we saw each other at school events, the most recent being the 6^th grade’s choir concert in mid-December.

                Just a week earlier, Jean Adams, musician extraordinaire, died at age 90. Jean and I had lots of experiences together—MacDowell Music Club and the Saline County Choral Society for two. I accompanied her flutist daughter Judy on the piano for many of Judy’s local performances.

                On January 9, a beloved United Methodist minister and journalist, Dr. John S. Workman of Conway, died. He was religion editor at the Arkansas Gazette. I inherited his books, Fireflies in a Fruit Jar, and Open Windows. The latter was a gift to my mother from her Sunday School class in 1988. Each member had signed it. All but the teacher have now died.

                But there’s more. I read the daily paper top half first with the bottom folded under. The second column of the day’s obituaries began this way: “Corning; from Hendrix College in Conway; and from Duke University Divinity School in 1962. He pastored churches in the former North Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church and in Missouri… Lynn crafted mountain dulcimers….”

                I keened and wailed longer than ever I’d done. He was another of my early “boyfriends.” Lynn McSpadden of Mountain View had died at age 76.

                When I was a senior at Hendrix and he was a junior, I was in love with him. If he’d asked me, I would’ve married him in a heartbeat. But he was smarter than that and it didn’t happen.

                Later, when friend Pat Guthrie and I made a trip to the Folk Center in Mountain View, we saw Lynn in his dulcimer shop. Since I taught folk music to middle grade students, I purchased one of his lap or mountain dulcimers—whether at that time or later, I forget—which I still have.

                The saddest part about this was a paragraph in the obit that his wife, Mary Catherine, or one of his children added. “If you do not smoke, or use tobacco in any form, don’t start. If you are already a smoker, QUIT NOW! Emphysema is a miserable disease.”

                During the early 1990s, when my friends and I visited the local VFW regularly, I met a woman named Margaret, whose body was invaded by cancer. She eventually died. I wrote a Butterfly pattern poem for her. I am updating it and reprinting it here in memory of the four saints I mourn today.

 

FOR CORKY, JEAN, JOHN and LYNN

Four lambs have passed through death’s bright door;

They will not feed again before

They visit God,

Whose shepherd’s rod

Has pulled them gently from this side

Of pain into God’s healing tide.

 

                Feelings of sympathy too strong for words go out to the Chenault, Adams, Workman and McSpadden families. May the strength of faith and the love of friends bless and keep them all. Amen.