And where do I put thier memory?

This is the braid that was cut from Grandma Haas's head when she entered the nursing home only a few days before her death in  1955 (as I recall.)

Now I do not want you to  think I have some sort of hair fetish, because I do not.  Mother had kept Grandma's braid for many years and when she passed it was given to me because I was the only one who knew whose it was or how it came to be in mother's possession. 

 

I recall the day I came home from Plevna High School and found I did not live there any more.  Grandma was not well.  We knew she had a light stroke.  It was her second.  When I had gone to live with them, she was using a walker and Great grandma Hatfield who was 99 years old at the time, was taking care of her.  I was there to help lighten her burden.  I loved both of those old ladies almost beyond belief.  They taught me to crochet and to read the Bible every night and pray before I took a bite of food or dared to raise up out of my bed in the morning.  Actually, it was not a bed.  I slept on the couch because they were worried that if I slept upstairs in one of the beds that something drastic could befall me.  I could fall down the stairs if I walked in my sleep.  The house could catch on fire and I would perish.  Some one might creep up the outside of the house and carry me away.  Any number of things could befall me, so I slept on the couch.  When cousin Carl would come to stay a night, I had to sleep on the settee behind the stove because he was taller and I fit just fine on that little thing as long as I drew my knees up to my chin.  Cousin Carl was a hoot!  He played basketball and I worshipped him.  (As I look back on my life I find I have loved and worshipped a lot of people.)

 

So back to that day.  Aunt Mabel and Uncle Goll had come from Coldwater.  Aunt Mabel was grandma's sister and she was married to my grandfathers brother, Uncle Goll.  That made all of us kids double cousins.  Sad as it seems, I have no idea where any of them are.  Course, they have no idea about me either!  I really think most of them are reaping their rewards up over my head.  Aunt Lola, mother's sister, was there.  Uncle Frank, Uncle Ray, and Uncle Charlie had all been consulted.  The decision was made to place grandma in the nursing home and Great grandma would return to Coldwater with Aunt Mabel.  (She remained there until her death at the ripe old age of 104.  She was in complete control of body and mind until just a few days before her death.)

 

My mind is not clear as to the sequence of events.  I know grandma was placed in the nursing home.  I may have remained with Aunt Mabel and Uncle Goll and Great grandma until grandma died just a few days later.  I do recall being in Plevna  and in school when she died.  The funeral service was held next door at the Congregational Church of Christ.  After the burial I returned to Nickerson and never saw the inside of the house again.  I know Aunt Lola emptied it out and mother received a small gray hassock full of crocheted doilies.  I thought that was so sad. 

 

I have been back to visit the town, but it has changed so.  The high school is torn down and all that remains is the gymnasium.  But in the gym was also the kitchen where Mrs. Crawford taught home economics.  It was in that room that she informed me I would never be anything important, because I was nothing like my beautiful mother.  And I flunked cooking under her tutelage, which I found ironic since I have owned and managed very nice restaurants most of my adult life and am a very good cook.  And she was wrong about me not being like my mother, because I am.  I just never made the beautiful part, but all the rest is there for the world to see. 

This braid was cut from the head of Bret Mercer (nee Cavendar) when he came to live with us in 1998 (as I recall).

Bret was our grandson.  When he was first born he spent lots of time with us.  Then his parents divorced and took new mates.  Bret still spent time with us.   When he was a tiny boy, he always wanted a "Kenny Mercer haircut", which we gave him.  He disappeared from our lives for sometime and when he returned he had very long hair.  As circumstances some times happen beyond our control he ended up coming to live with us and the first thing he wanted was his hair cut.  We of course gave him what he wanted.  So this is a symbolic hank of hair here.  We ended up adopting Bret and this remains in my top dresser drawer with the one from Grandma Haas.

 

So my question here is this:  What do I do with these mementoes?  I can not just throw them away.  That would be sacrilegious as far as I am concerned.  So I keep them in the drawer and take them out very rarely.  Grandma's is very dry and brittle.  Bret's is still supple and filled with color and highlights.  But what about 10, 20 or 30 years from now when someone is going through my belongings and they come upon this hair?  Will they know what it is?  I could put a note in with it, but do I want to do that?  It is a quandary.

 

For the time being, I am just going to put them back in the drawer and forget I seen them.  Grandma's especially brings tears to my eyes to just look at it.  It is like spun gold and the head that produced it is so dear to me ...... 

 

 

 

Copied directly from MSN News in case you missed it on the PFLAG Blog.

Following her son's beating death 15 years ago, Judy Shepard has become a forceful voice for gay rights and a sort of mother figure for gay teens turned away by their own families.

NEW YORK — The mother who championed gay rights after her son was tied to a fence and beaten to death couldn't bear to sit through the play that has helped keep his memory alive for the nearly 15 years since his murder.
But this weekend, at the opening of a double-billing of Moises Kaufman's "The Laramie Project" and "The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Judy Shepard — seated in an aisle seat to allow for an easy escape — soldiered through the entire five-hour production, which recalls the story of Matthew Shepard's death in 1998.
"I just really didn't feel I needed to watch it because I lived it. And so many of the scenes bring back such horrific memories. I've never felt comfortable crying in public," Shepard said just before the Saturday performance. "It's been 15 years. I should be able to do this now."
Shepard made it through with the help of hugs from well-wishers at the intermissions.
Kaufman, a playwright and director who leads the Tectonic Theater Project, recalled the Shepard murder as a watershed moment that helped create a generation of activists and energize "straight allies" to the cause of gay rights.
"All of a sudden we had an image, we had an event, that operated as a catalyst," said Kaufman, a Venezuelan native who lives in New York.
The original play was born from the question of why Shepard's murder resonated more than other hate crimes, Kaufman said. The play has been staged more than 1,000 times.
Ten years after Shepard's death, Kaufman and Tectonic returned to Laramie, Wyo., to produce an epilogue and to interview Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, who are serving life sentences for the murder.
Nine U.S. states have legalized same-sex marriage, and in March the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage under federal law as being between a man and a woman, and whether Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage, should be struck down.
ANATOMY OF A MURDER
Henderson and McKinney confessed to meeting the 21-year-old at a Laramie bar on the night of Oct. 6-7, pretending to be gay and offering him a ride home, with the intent to rob him. They grew enraged after Shepard made a sexual advance, they said, and took him to a desolate area in the outskirts of town, tied him to a fence and repeatedly struck him in the head with a handgun.
Shepard was close to death when he was discovered 18 hours later and he died in a Colorado hospital on Oct. 12. In her 2010 book, "The Meaning of Matthew," Judy Shepard wrote that while she was at her son's side, she was barely aware of the rallies by thousands of well-wishers in cities across the country.
Judy Shepard, who is soft-spoken and shy despite her years in the limelight, says she is a reluctant advocate. But she has become a forceful voice for gay rights and a sort of mother figure for gay teens turned away by their own families.
"Many of us feel that Judy is the mother we never had. But it goes way beyond that," Kaufman said. "It's a story of a person who was put in an untenable situation and got the skills to triumph in that situation."
Shepard, who still lives in Wyoming, heads the Matthew Shepard Foundation and has fought for gay rights in her home state and for a federal hate crimes bill, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2009 with Shepard at his side.
"I did what people didn't expect me to do, which was not go away," she said. "As a straight person, I have a gravitas that someone in the gay community saying the things that I say would not have."
She said she has been frustrated that change in Wyoming, also the setting of the 2005 film "Brokeback Mountain," has come slowly. The state has no hate crimes law and this year the legislature rejected a gay marriage bill and a domestic partnership bill for same-sex couples.
Before the performance, a man who said he was about the same age as Matthew Shepard would be now tearfully thanked Shepard for her advocacy and said gay people "could not have had a better angel and a better mother."
Shepard's eyes also filled with tears, but she quickly regained her composure, saying: "This is what happens when you piss off somebody's mom."
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