Another chapter closes. Bettie Joe Chaffin. For her children, she fought a good fight. She was a giving person. She touched this world in a unique way. Her care and love for her baby brother, my dad, influenced her baby brother's children in tremendous ways. We spent a lot of time with her. She advocated our relationship with my maternal grandparents and adored them. "Vicky, they are/were great people. Some of the best people." Sometimes when we were with her, she picked up the phone (back when there were charges for calls to places 20 plus miles away) and insisted we call to check in on our grandparents. She would let us talk as long as we'd like.
She is one I'm very similar to in terms of my hypersensitive nervous system. In fact, she was likely more nervous. She was a worrywart. Other than her nervous nature, and all the bacon grease, she remained relatively healthy and extremely feisty all of her years, until she was diagnosed with breast cancer in late summer of 2012. The lady also got through life with relatively good eyes, resorting only to OTC magnifying glasses as she grew older. I did not get her or my father's healthy eyes.
In our last conversations, she talked about how many more years she lived than her mother, who died of cancer in 1952, but at the age of 46. Indeed Aunt Bettie was satisfied and ready to move on.
She would have been 85 on July 19. I imagine her reunion with her mom was glorious. I imagine she and my father talking nonstop and leading endless conversations with their sister(s) and brothers chiming in every so often with sarcastic and silly comments. (I was just told that Uncle Kenny talked more than all of them -- that Aunt Bettie was quiet in comparison. That's hard to imagine!) This might not mean much to the audience of this blog, but oh my goodness, it says so much to our family about the liveliness of that generation.
Our memory of her and memories with her live on. I'm thankful for that.
