Mom with Luke and new son (mom's 4th great-grandson), Thomas Roy Dunlap, on August 14, 1999 at picnic with the Purdy's and the Dunlaps by Luke and Sonja's house.  This last picture with mom and Luke and you can just see the love shared between them.  

Mom about two weeks after her Sept. 24th stroke.  Mom is trying!

Mom walking with just Bill's arm helping.  She wanted to be able to walk unassisted and tried very hard.

Mom's last trip was a wonderful day-trip that just Bill and mom took on Sept. 18th, 1999.  They first went to St. John's to bring a computer part to Michael.   Mom had a great time at her beloved St. John's and was so VERY happy that Michael was attending St. John's where her husband Michael had attended for only one year before he had had to return to Minot and the railroad to support his mother and four siblings.  

Mom was so happy and Michael was big man on campus but who took the time to listen to mom's stories about how she had seen her husband suffer his whole life with regret that he had NOT been able to continue at St. John's.  Michael acknowledged that if it were not for Pauline and Michael and their contributions to his Catholic education that he would not be at St. John's.  Mom said, "Your welcome Michael and had tears in her eyes."

Mom saw the picture behind her of the poster girl and said, "Now that's what you call having your ass hang out."  She laughed so hard and this picture was snapped at just that moment.

It was absolutely beautiful out when Bill and mom left St. Johns and so they decided to drive their "new car" (Luke's old - Lanee's old little GEO) up to Nevis and to see Herb and Nancy Thorndal (Nanny's sister Bubby's son and wife) who live near Nevis.  Not far from St. Johns as they were riding along, mom asked Bill to stop so she could touch the "beautiful corn" which was 7 feet tall and ready for harvest.  

Mom had the best time and said, "I have never seen such a wonderful crop of corn.  When I was young the farmers would have thought they died and went to heaven to see such a crop.  All we had in the thirties was dust and grasshoppers.  I remember the sky getting completely dark when the locust would come.  I don't know how we survived."

Mom was so happy to be out in the sun with her "heavenly sunshine" in the middle of "God's corn."   Mom and I had a wonderful day-trip and when we finally got home at midnight we had driven 425 miles, ate lunch at her beloved St. Johns, stopped at 2 dairy queens, seen grandson Michael, Herb and Nancy Thorndal, Jim McAllister and family, and spent the whole day together having fun as mom said, "Just like two kids."   Little did we know that this would be our last trip together.

Mom and dad together under dad's "big North Dakota sky" and mom's "heavenly sunshine".  (Picture taken June 10, 2000)  May they rest in PEACE.

MY MEMORIES OF PAULINE PURDY
by Mary Margaret McAllister 
(Jim McAllister's 17 year-old daughter who saw mom a lot when we would go to Nevis.)

As I looked into the eyes
of a woman who brought joy to my day

Little did I know 
she would soon be on her way

On her way to heaven
it did not take her long to arrive

God has given to her eternal life
in Him she believed
in the cruel world she survived.

Though she faced darkness
she always saw it through

I could see it in her heart that with God,
each day was new

It did not matter if it was rain or shine
she saw beauty in all God's gifts

This I saw as she went on her walks
I did not know then, her presence I would miss!

Every time I think of her
all of  my heart smiles

I see her cute face as she says to me:
"How do you like them apples?"

With LOVE,
Mary Margaret McAllister
February 14, 2000

--------------------------------------------------------

"I still miss my sweet mother and grieve her death more than I can describe." 
(Bill Purdy - September 7, 2000)

Good grief, society needs to step
back and learn to mourn

Published: Thursday, September 7, 2000 
Jane Eisner
Syndicated columnist

Phyllis Taylor first noticed it 25 years ago in Labor
and Delivery at Einstein Hospital -- how swiftly and
mechanically the stillborn babies were sent to the
morgue. Sedated mothers and ignored fathers weren't
allowed to hold their children. There'd be no record
of the pregnancy or the birth.

Taylor, then a nurse, set about creating a place for
grief. She would warm some towels, wrap up the cold
little body, and allow the family to be together for the
first and last time.

Sometimes she'd photograph the child and take its
footprint. She'd write up a sort of birth/death
certificate. When parents left the hospital, they'd have
something.

For this, the medical staff derided her as the Angel of
Death.

Now such practice is commonplace. Hospitals and
hospices are more sensitive, but as a culture we don't
deal with grief very well. We don't give ourselves
time to mourn.

We're good, very good, at noting the shock of death
and the tumult of interment. Then it becomes
yesterday's news.  Mourners are expected to get on
with their lives, as if grieving were subject to the
Nike philosophy: Just do it.

``I'm appalled at the regular person who only gets
three days of bereavement from their job if their
husband or their child dies,'' says Taylor, now a
hospice consultant to the Philadelphia prison system.
``There's no outward sign that a life's been shattered.''

I remember thinking how odd it was that President
Clinton went to work the day after he buried his
mother, the only real parent he ever had. Virginia
Kelley died of breast cancer Jan. 6, 1994. She was
buried Jan. 8. On Jan. 9, the president was in
Brussels, giving a speech.

``A culture that denies grief is a culture that denies
attachment,'' says John Raines, a professor of religion
at Temple University.  And that's what our culture does
-- worship those who travel fast, carry no baggage,
and sublimate the hurt of loss in the quest for the next
new thing.

Raines sees a yearning for another way. His course,
Death and Dying, has become the religion
department's most popular offering. College students,
he believes, ``find something wrong with our
emphasis only on youth, health, acquisitions, success.''
Studying the grief process is, for many of them, a first
chance to contemplate their own losses.

Surely our response to grief is a function of modernity;
ancient cultures and religions lived with death and
mourning more comfortably than we do. Traditional
Judaism accepts that grief comes in stages and has
rituals for each milestone. Islam gives special
recognition to the close relatives of the deceased on
each anniversary.

Secular society acts as if it has outgrown the signs and
restraints that once marked the mourner. I'm not
suggesting a return to the days when mourning would
have prevented Scarlett O'Hara from enjoying a
dance. But it is telling that a woman I know -- modern,
professional -- confessed months after her husband
died that she wished she could wear ``widow's black''
to signal the suffering that lingered within, gnawing at
her soul.

``All those years I fell for the great palace lie that
grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and
as privately,'' Anne Lamott wrote after the death of a
dear friend. ``But what I've discovered since is that
the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated
place and that only grieving can heal grief.

``You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to
keep on crying; and then, finally, grief ends up giving
you the two best things: softness and illumination.'' 

----------------------------------------------------------

Bill Purdy

Bill has gone to his mother's funeral(s) in Fargo and Minot, North Dakota and will return on Tuesday, Dec. 21, 1999.

To BNSF Homepage                    

-------------------------------------------------------------

end of page