Something else I didn't know about my mother

We took my mother back to her hometown to be buried next to her husband (my father). We were told by the funeral director that there was no rush so after she passed away on May 11, we set the funeral for Saturday, May 21. Since the end came rather unexpectedly, it gave us time to contact all of our relatives and to make sure everything was ready instead of rushing. For as sad as I was that she died, I am glad that her pain and anxiety won't bother her anymore. As I said in a previous post, she is with God and my father and many of her other relatives and friends. I also hope she is with the pets that she loved in life. Heaven would be even better with dogs.

In a post from seven years ago, I told part of the story about my parents eloping during the Second World War. But there were two things I didn't know about that story. One was that my grandfather really did take a gun with him to stop my parents from getting married. The other was that my mother was supposed to marry another man. Now, some people say they were engaged and others say that my grandparents had just arranged for her to marry the other man. But now I see that this wasn't the funny little adventure I'd always thought and I now see why my mother didn't like to talk about it. She made a lot of people mad by running off with my father. At the funeral, I talked with one of my aunts about it and she said that she had seen the letters that her sister and her husband had exchanged about the event. It turns out that the man my mother was supposed to marry was the older brother of her older sister's husband! My Aunt Edith and her husband (my uncle) Bill must have had something to do with setting Bill's brother up with my mother. They say that Uncle Bill's brother was a good looking man but he was not really the kind of guy my mother would have liked. He was spoiled (they say) and rather self-centered. Those are not things that appealed to my mother. Supposedly, she tried to break up with him a number of times but her parents and her sister and brother-in-law kept pushing her into it.

So, as my Aunt June explained it, my mother really had no other choice but to elope with my father. I now see why emotions were running so high and that this really wasn't something my mother wanted to talk about because she did feel a little sorry for the other guy. But not too sorry.