Another chapter of history was completed on December 7, 2017. What is history anyhow? According to the dictionary.com, history is a continuous, systematic narrative of past events as relating to a particular people, country, period, person, etc., usually written as a chronological account. Do you think of the death of a person or a loved one as the completion of history? There are a series of events in our lives as we journey through life. These events happen in chronological order. They end at the time of death.
Mary Ann McKinney, my brother’s wife, completed her journey through life December 7, 2017, and the last chapter was complete. She was sixty-eight years old at the time of her death. She was a lady who touched and changed many lives. You may be asking what lives did she touch and how did she do that? Mary Ann taught school for thirty-four years. Those who are not teacher/educators may not be aware of the impact that a teacher/educator has on the lives of the students who are assigned to their classrooms.
There were a lot of children who came through her fourth-grade classroom over those thirty-four years. The students she taught were of average and low ability levels, middle income families and low-income families, but to Mary Ann they were all the same. She loved teaching, her love for her students were evident in the stories she shared of them, and the years that she spent in the classroom. Teaching is a tough profession; however, the reward is knowing that you have touched a life and put a glow of hope into a life.
Family was an important part of Mary Ann’s life. Her immediate family was her husband, two children, and five grandchildren. Then, there was her only sibling, a brother who was special to her. He didn’t live his life as his sister would have chosen for him; however, she loved him because he was “her brother.”
She was a talented lady and was as some folks would call it, a traditionalist. “Things need to stay as they are, they work well, and no one should change them,” she would say. When computers were being introduced into the classrooms, she was happy with things as they were and wasn’t interested in learning to use one, and she managed her classroom without a computer. She loved decorating in themes which was a skill she used in her teaching as well as her home.
One might say that family themes are events in a person’s life and covers many aspects. There are celebrations such as births and deaths, holidays, education, occupation, traditions, spiritual, and social. Mary Ann wanted things to be decorated according to the event that was taking place at that time.
Once she retired from teaching, she took on the challenge of leading the senior adult group in her church. She worked with the “Joy” group in the church and prepared their events, such as the speakers and the meals. She saved the decorations from her years of classroom teaching and used those to decorate the dinner tables in the Family Life Center, the meeting place for the senior adult group. She was creative in many ways due to her education and training as a teacher/educator.
Mary Ann doesn’t know how many lives she touched and changed; but she loved the journey she took along the way. As we journey through life we don’t know how many lives we touch. The same is true about our ancestors as they journeyed through life. They didn’t know they would have descendants who would be looking at their lives and mapping their journey. Some of those ancestors’ lives are easy to map and others are a bit more difficult for whatever reason. However, we continue to look for ways to identify them and map their lives so that we can be assured we have the correct ancestor.
One day Mary Ann will be someone’s ancestor who will be researching and mapping her life. Her descendants will research her life and map it as we do ours. It will be an easy task for her descendants since she lived and died in the area where she was born. She lived and died in the house she grew up in, taught at the same elementary school she attended as a student, attended the same church as a child and adult, married in the same church, attended college in her hometown, and was well educated with a plus thirty in education. Her journey through life from birth up to the time of her death was an interesting venture. She worked to improve the quality of life for others.
Mary Ann’s death came suddenly and unexpectedly. Humans are not assured of tomorrow, so are you living each day more consciously. Or, are you sleepwalking through life? Life is full of experiences while making the journey. Are those experiences ones that your descendants will be proud of and be happy to say, "this is my ancestor."
As we journey through life our descendants will we proud to call us their ancestors or they will be saddened by the life we lived? What will they be able to say about us? For each of us our final chapter will come, and we will be someone’s ancestor. How will our final chapter read?
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| A peach orchard near Ruston, Louisiana Photograph courtesy of Office of Louisiana Tourism |
What a wonderful tribute to your sister-in-law. She sounds like a very caring, giving person who left this world way too young.
ReplyDeleteThank you Linda for stopping by. She was caring person and loved her family. There were so many unfinished tasks and no goodbyes, but we were blessed to know her.
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