The World According to Hattie May

By Liz Zuercher

A year ago we went to Peoria, Illinois to bury Gary’s mother, Hattie May. The funeral director led us to the room where the services would be.  All the pink flowers and the pink satin dress didn’t surprise me.  Hattie loved pink.  What surprised me was the woman in the casket.  This couldn’t be our Hattie.  The Hattie May we knew wore a perpetual look of childlike wonder.  Where was that?  Where was her wide-open face, her ready smile?  Where was the love that poured out of her, that desire always to please?

“Don’t you want a donut?  A strawberry sody?” she should be saying.  “I’ve got Drumsticks in the freezer.”  She always had ice cream Drumsticks in the freezer.  We could count on that, just like we could count on those sayings of hers, the ones she’d heard from her mother, Grandma Sweet.

“You can’t get finished, if you don’t get started,” she’d say when you were dragging your heels about doing chores.

If you were whining about something you really wanted, she’d say, “If I gave you the world and a fence around it, you’d still want a slice off the moon.”

If she asked you to do something and you said, “What?” she’d say, “I don’t stutter and your ears don’t flip back and forth.”

Our Hattie May was not shy about telling you how she felt – good or bad.  You always knew where you stood with her.  Like she said, “When my heart gets so full, it spills out my mouth.”

She didn’t suffer fools, and had some choice sayings to express her point of view:

“Good is good, but too good is a fool.”

“When drink goes in sense goes out.”

“Can’t wipe yourself clean on a dirty towel.”

“You are talking when you should be listening.”

We always listened to Hattie May.  Her wisdom sprang from the lessons of real life.  She worked hard and kept her modest home spotless.  She wasn’t fancy - she had all she needed, she told us. She loved simple things: doing word search puzzles with colored pens, because the page looked so pretty when the puzzle was done, or watching Lawrence Welk and Disney movies with a bowl of popcorn.  And she loved a good joke.

“Many a true word is spoken in a joke,” she’d say.

Hattie loved her church, and Sunday was her favorite day of the week.  “Some day it will be Sunday every day,” she’d say.  That was the day she thanked the good Lord for all her blessings, the day she got to relax and enjoy those blessings with her family.  For her nothing was better than that.

Above all, she loved her family.  She was fiercely loyal and generous to us. Her husband, Charlie, was the love of her life, and she missed him every moment of the decades between his passing and hers.  Reminiscences often prompted another saying, “Oh, happy days gone by.”  This one might bring a tear to her eye.

No, the woman in the casket, dressed all in pink, surrounded by pink flowers, wasn’t our Hattie.  Our Hattie May was with Charlie and the rest of the family who’d gone before her.  They were all relaxing together on an eternal Sunday afternoon.