My Respect to Aunt Dot and Uncle Frank

When I got home tonight and listened to the answering machine tonight, I knew something was wrong. My mother's voice: "Donna, this is your mother. Call me as soon as you get home." It sounded serious. I wondered why she did not call me on my cell phone, but noted that at the time of her call I was conducting a premarital counseling class.

When I called my mother back and first heard her voice, I had the feeling she was going to tell me of the death of her best friend from high school with whom she has continued a friendship nearly 70 years. That was my gut feeling from her tone. She recently spoke of the friend's declining health. Instead she told me that a couple with whom my parents have been friends for many years had been in a car accident. I called this couple Aunt Dot and Uncle Frank, but they were not actually blood relatives. Aunt Dot and my father had been friends since childhood. They grew up in the same church. When each of them married, their spouses went to the same church. So my parents and Aunt Dot and Uncle Frank all became close friends. Both couples moved from Woodlawn to the South East Lake / Roebuck area. Aunt Dot and Uncle Frank's daughters were the same ages as my middle siblings. We all went to the same high school. Our families remained close. When our home church closed, we kept in touch, even though we not longer attended the same church. A bonus of the Methodist church being a connectional church is that we could easily keep each with each other at district events or I could ask their pastor about them. Or because it is a small world, a friend at HUMC discovered that his walking buddy at the mall, who attended Trussville UMC had known me all of my life because of West Woodlawn UMC.

Sadly, Aunt Dot some how lost control of the vehicle she was driving yesterday and hit a tree. As a result, both Aunt Dot and Uncle Frank died. Tonight when I was looking at the Bham News blog regarding the accident, I noted bickering breaking out in the comments section. This seemed to arise from some one's comment that if there was a silver lining is was that they went together. I do not take offense to such a comment, but someone did and an argument started. I do not know what all was said because some comments had been removed as offensive by the time I read the blog. But I thought it was very sad that people who did not even know this couple were passionately arguing over whether there was a silver lining in the event.

Here's my take. Two people who had been married for many years, who had two daughters and two grandchildren, who were active in the church, who were hard-working, fine Christian people died at the same time. They lived together. They served together. They died together. It makes it very difficult for their daughters and grandchildren. But as one person commented, the way they died together is like the end of some romantic movie. It is bittersweet.

No mater what your take on this, my Aunt Dot and Uncle Frank deserve more respect than for total strangers to get in a childish name-calling argument on a blog reporting their death.

So here is to two lives well-spent.