Joy and Sorrow…You Lead the Way: A Memoir

By Dean Carter

Joy and Sorrow ...You Lead the Way The stories are about the journey the author takes as she remembers and shares with the reader her experiences from the tender age of three through to adulthood. Woven through in precise detail are the lives and deaths of close family members. Each member carries her along in depth as she travels through her own road of life. The stories describe how every event influences and impacts her life to the extent of profoundly shaping who she eventually becomes.
The writer observes from three years of age to adulthood how various family members live and eventually meet their deaths. The saga first began with her standing and watching in the doorway as she sees her mother rocking her sixth month old baby brother in her arms while he labors to take each breath. His little arm goes limp and falls to his side as he takes his last breath. She witnesses the tears streaming down her mothers face. Thus the stories slowly but surely unfold carrying the reader grippingly right into the life of the author as she shares her Joys and Sorrow ...as she leads the way.


Death is a season we all must pass through. And just like flowers, God awakens us to ... So why should we grieve when our love ones die For well meet them again in a cloudless sky. By Big mike

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477113905

Book preview

Chapter 1

Six-Month-Old Baby Boy

The year was around 1945. The temperature had dropped the night before, and while this was not a particularly cold winter, the town was blanketed with snow. All had awakened to the most gorgeous sight you’d ever hope to see. All fires were blazing in the old farmhouse built in the late 1930s. As you ventured from room to room, you could still feel the chilly draft that always remained in certain areas of the house during the cold winter months. The linoleum floors in the kitchen and on the back porch cracked and curled noticeably around the edges from years of wear and tear. The floors were ice-cold to your feet, even with socks on, during the cold winter months. The rest of the floors throughout the house were wooden but were cold as well, and you always tried to walk on the throw rugs scattered about. Whenever you ventured from room to room, you mostly kept your thick woolen socks on.

This was the house where we were all born and grew up, with the exception of my older half brother Ben—who grew up there but was not born there—and later, the baby boy Grayson. They were both born in hospitals. The rest of us had midwife deliveries.

If there was no school for the day, when the chamber pots were emptied and the farm animals were all fed, then our chores were done for the morning. We were free to enjoy the beauty of the gorgeous outdoors. The outhouse stood a short distance away. As the years went by and my father became more prosperous, we did eventually get indoor plumbing. The outhouse stood for several years after we’d gotten the indoor plumbing. It served as a reminder of how things used to be.

On this particularly cold winter day, the ground was covered with snow, and icicles hung from trees and windowsills everywhere. It was so majestically beautiful that it took your breath away. As you looked out over the small rural settlement, you could see that all the housetops were covered with snow, and smoke puffed from chimneys everywhere. It looked like something out of a seventeenth-century novel or an old 1800s Western movie. It was picturesque indeed.

It did not always snow in the winter where we grew up. There were no guarantees that we would actually see snow from one winter to the next, so needless to say, we were all very excited to see the winter-white terrain. The old barn was covered with the white stuff. The animals were hunkered down inside the barn in a futile attempt to keep warm. Obviously, it was pretty darn cold outside whether you were man or animal.

If you didn’t know any better, you would have thought that all was well in paradise, and especially in the little town in rural Oklahoma. Little did we know what terrible and imminent darkness was about to reach out and grab the family, removing the joy and causing untold sorrow. In just a few days, all the joy and beauty before us would vanish, thus marking the beginning of a long history of pain and sorrow.

Much of our joy had to do with the fact that we had a new baby in our home. His name was Sean Webster. Sean was six months old. As a fatherly gesture, my dad decided to take Sean out to see his first snow. He bundled him up, and away they went. Sean saw his very first winter wonderland. As the day progressed, we all went in and out of the house all day long to see or play in the magical snow before it all melted away. We would sometimes reach outside our window and break off one of the hanging icicles and suck on it until it was all melted. God! What fun!

The outing proved to be too much for baby Sean. I don’t know how or why he became ill, but a few days after seeing his first snow, he came down with a dreaded case of pneumonia. Maybe his immune system was not strong enough at the time, I do not know. None of the rest of us became ill, not even with a common cold. I don’t know exactly how many days it took for Sean’s illness to manifest itself. I just remember that on the last day of his life, my mom was sitting by the big potbellied wood-burning stove, rubbing his little chest with Vicks salve.

Chapter 2

A Life Cut Short

Sean’s every breath was labored. I can still recall the struggle it was for him to breathe as his little chest slowly went up and down and then faster and faster. Yes, at three years old, this was, and indeed is, one of the few early memories that I can actually recall. How I could have been aware of this poignant moment when I was barely three years old, I don’t know. But I was. I can easily go back and configure Sean’s age and the ages of my other siblings and quickly calculate just how old I was at the time.

I surmised that it was not a happy time because I saw tears rolling down my mother’s face. But the actual gravity of the moment was missing from my childlike awareness. I shed no tears for baby Sean on that painful day. I do think that at some level, I did understand the finality of his passing, but not the tragedy of it all. I was too young to understand or attach a level of mourning to his departure. It wasn’t until years later, after losing my one and only child, that I did finally understand.

Anyway, Mom was sitting by the old stove, rocking Sean while putting salve on his tiny chest. I could hear her praying and sometimes singing to him. I distinctly recall standing in the doorway of the room when little Sean’s tiny body went limp. I had just witnessed this small and short-lived little life gasp for and take his last breath.

Over the years, I have never forgotten those last moments of Sean’s life. His little arm fell to his side. I saw the tears streaming down my mother’s face. Sean was dead. We would never really know him or play with him again. He was gone. I have no other memories of that defining and hollow moment until the day of his funeral.

Chapter 3

The Funeral

All of the in-between details that had to have taken place in preparation for the infant’s funeral are not in my memory. I did not grasp the defining impact of the situation, even after seeing my mother’s tears. The life of a child had ended before it had barely even begun.

I have two older living siblings I could have questioned regarding their memories of that particular time to help me fill in the blanks, but I decided to leave the blanks as lost memories. You see, had I asked them to shed some light on the events, their memories would have become comingled with mine, and it would have been too hard to sort through them and know which actually were my memories and experiences with death and not theirs. I do remember that on the day of the funeral, there were a lot of people at the house and a lot of food. I recall several children, including myself, were outside playing. I don’t remember any snow, so I suspect that it had melted by the time of the funeral. I also don’t think we would all have been outside playing the way I remember if there had been snow on the ground. We were having a lot of fun. For me, there was no feeling of pain or sadness. Remember, I was just barely three years old.

Many years have passed since then, and now as an adult, I have often wondered if my dad felt sad, cried, or even blamed himself for Sean’s sudden illness. Did he feel responsible for his death? This was not the first child of his that had preceded him in death. There were at least two others—a half sister from a previous marriage of my father’s who had died in childbirth and a half brother who died from consumption (TB) before any of us were even born. I have wondered if my father was becoming immune and somehow desensitized to death, pain, and sorrow.

Years later, as I pondered those days and that moment in time, I felt a tremendous sadness and sorrow in my heart that I never knew my brother and that I never cried for him. Today I can say that I have cried more tears from watching a sad movie than I shed for him. Nowadays, however, when I travel back to the town where I grew up and visit the cemetery where Mom, Dad, and little Sean are all buried, I often stop by baby Sean’s gravesite. I remind him that I remember the day he left us. I let him know that he is not forgotten. But to this very day, I still ask why.

Chapter 4

Will We Ever Understand?

As I grew older, and later as an adult, I pondered the question as to why Sean had to die. Why is it that a beautiful child is born into the world (a child loved by his family)? I recall my mom sometimes mentioning him as the most handsome baby boy she’d given birth to. Why did he come, seemingly only to say goodbye before he even took his first step? Some say there is a reason, that it is not just the bad luck of the draw, that there is some kind of divine reasoning or purpose. Not one, of course, that we are supposed to get in this life but will understand by and by. Some say those who didn’t get a needed lesson they were supposed to learn in a previous life have to return to earth again and again until they do. Once the lesson is learned, then they are free to go home again to their Heavenly Father. Others go on to say that they came to teach others, or some particular soul, a lesson. For every action, there is a lesson to be learned.

What was Sean’s short life about? What was the purpose? Surely it was more than just to grace our presence for six months, only to leave us grieving in sorrow for his memory. Perhaps Sean saw and did, even at six months old, what he’d come here to do, and it was simply time for him to go home again. Maybe that in itself is where he’d rather be. After all, he was a baby just come down from Heaven. Maybe it was easy for him to remember what Heaven was like, and choosing Heaven over earth was