Gracie, my mom, passed away yesterday. She had just finished lunch and was having tea with her friend from across the hall when she reached for her heart and was gone. I am glad to know that she did not suffer and that someone was with her at the end.
This might be the first time Gracie’s name is mentioned on the internet, for she had no interest in such newfangled things. It could be argued she had little use for anything invented after about 1947. But for all that, Gracie was both a wonderful mom and person. She loved children and made them her life’s work. She had six kids of her own and adopted a seventh. She ran a day care out of her home for years. And for even more years she took in foster children, over a hundred in all. I remember the difficulty she had in handing over a child who had been in her care from the age of three days and then over a year later was being adopted. Somehow she found the strength to go against her instinct to hold on to that child and she handed the toddler over. The latter howled while my mother’s heart broke. But all of it -all of it- was done for the sake of what was best for that child. She remembered each and every one of those babies and tried as best as she was able to follow their lives from a distance.
I also remember how sad she was when the authorities informed her and my dad they had become too old to take in foster children. However, they were not too old to travel and they now had the freedom to do it. They spent many happy winters in the southern States together.
Gracie was predeceased by Ed, my father, in 2000. They were married almost sixty years. As my brother Brad says, they are now together once again and for always. That is a very nice thought for they were wonderfully in love.
Goodnight dear Ma, I will miss you mightily.
Emma Grace (Vokes) Dunham 1919-2009
