It was supposed to have been a celebration of life. Homer Brown had turned 70 two days before, and his family and
friends were coming over for a cookout on July 23, 1994. Homer was mowing the barn yard
with a riding lawnmower so he and his wife, Louise, could set up a volleyball net for the
children.
Sadly, those were the last hours
Homer was to spend at his homeplace in Troutman. He started hemorrhaging while mowing, and
Louise took him to Iredell Memorial Hospital in Statesville.
He spent five months in and out of
the intensive-care unit there. Doctors found that blood vessels in his colon had ruptured
and removed part of it. When he began hemorrhaging again, they removed even more.
But Homer began to have other
problems, according to Louise.
“His immune system kind of
got out of whack,” she says. “The wound from the surgery would not heal. He
would take pneumonia because he was lying flat on his back, and the medication they gave
him for the infection caused his kidneys to fail.”
The six months that followed were
like a roller coaster ride. “One day, he would be alert and know what was going on
around him,” she says. “The next day, it was like the bottom would fall
out.”
Louise spent every night at the
hospital.
“I didn’t leave
him,” she says. “I went from a size 18 or 20 down to an 8 or 10 in those six
months. I was just so worried and upset. There were some nights I didn’t sleep at
all. Some days, I ate. Some days, he was so sick, I couldn’t.”
Homer spent the last month of his
life in the intensive-care unit at Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte, where he was on and
off a ventilator.
“We thought he was going to
come home, but he didn’t,” Louise says. “In the end, what killed him was
heart failure. That strong heart just gave out.”
The Browns had been married for 17
“wonderful years,” says Louise. She had been married before and had six children
when she met him at Shepherd’s Baptist Church near Mooresville. He was 47 and had
never been married.
“I truly believe that if God
ever put two people together, it was me and Homer,” Louise says. “He needed
somebody, and so did we. He was really good for me and the children.”
Louise and Homer saw each other
regularly for six years before they got married. They went places and did things with the
children as a family.
“I didn’t know what
marriage was until I married Homer,” Louise says. “He was a wonderful husband.
We never argued. We enjoyed each other too much to argue.”
After Homer died, she moved to a
mobile home on her son’s property outside of China Grove.
It was the first time in her life
she had ever lived alone.
“The loneliness, the grief
was very bad,” she says. “I’m a people person. I think the worst thing
anybody could ever do to me was put me alone.”
Her doctor offered to prescribe
medication to help her through it, but she declined.
“I knew that when I had to
give up the medication, the depression and heartache would still be there,” she says.
“So I chose to try it on my own. I knew if it got too bad, all I had to do was pick
up the phone.”
Louise says the first stage of
grief is the worst. “You just want to curl up and sit in a corner all the time,”
she says. “When I got through that, I started paying attention to other people’s
problems.”
What Louise noticed was that there
were a lot of widows around her. A tenth of the people who attended Sunday school at Fern
Hill Baptist Church near Troutman, for instance, were widows.
“But when I started looking
for a support group, there wasn’t one out there,” she says.
The funeral home which handled the
arrangements for Homer’s funeral had a support group which met four times a year.
“But it was like 100 people, and when you get 100 people together,” she says,
“you lose that support.”
Besides, the last place she wanted
to be, she says, was a funeral home.
The more Louise thought about it,
the more she felt there was a need for a support group for widows and widowers. She made
an appointment to talk to her pastor about it.
“I said, ‘Somebody
should do something,’” she recalls. “He said, ‘What do you think
should be done?’I said, ‘At the very least, we should have a widows’
support group here or somewhere.’ ”
The Rev. Jesse Stroud asked Louise
how she would go about it, and she began jotting down problems that widowed persons face
and ideas for programs. Stroud ran the idea by the church deacons before proposing the
idea to the church widows.
That group has been meeting
monthly for about a year now.
When Louise talked to Ann Simmons
of the Cooperative Extension Service about getting some literature for the programs, Ann
encouraged her to start a group in Rowan. Louise was hesitant because she hadn’t met
many people in the county.
But with Ann agreeing to help with
resources, she ran an ad in the newspaper for a meeting at the library last summer. Eight
widows showed up.
Among them was Frances Lavender,
whose widowed friend saw the ad in the paper and told her about it. They went to the
meeting together and have been going monthly ever since.
Frances’ husband, James H.
Lavender, died 20 months ago after a long battle with heart disease and cancer.
“It just helps to be with a
group that is like I am, that has lost their mate,” she says. “And it helps to
talk about that. Others talk with me when I begin to cry a lot of times.”
She cries a lot, especially at
night.
“I ask myself,” she
says. “I say, ‘Frances why are you crying? You know he’s better off.’
But I do miss him. I miss him so much. There are not many days I don’t go by the
cemetery, and that might make it harder.’”
The couple met at a square dance
and were married for almost 45 years. Because they had no children, Frances doesn’t
have any close family to help her through the grief.
“It hasn’t gotten any
easier,” she says. “I told someone I thought I would never get over it.”
Margie Crowell also read about the
support group for widowed persons, called Caring and Sharing, in the newspaper. She went
to the meeting and says it seemed to help her.
The husband of one of the women
there had worked with her husband, and that made her feel more comfortable.
“It’s a small group,” she says. “We can talk, and if we want to cry,
we can cry.”
Margie had a hard time financially
when her husband, Floyd Ray Crowell Sr., died on March 15, 1998, from diabetes and heart
disease. Though she continues to draw a portion of his retirement, the amount of money
coming into the household is about half what it was.
Financial issues is a topic
discussed at Caring and Sharing, along with grief, loneliness and depression, fraud,
health and wellness, nutrition and personal safety at home and in the community.
Amelia Watts, county extension
director, has done a program for the group on avoiding scams, and Ann Simmons presented a
program on cooking for one.
“Many times, widows
don’t continue to cook meals because they dine alone,” Ann says.
“That’s a wellness issue because, of course, if their nutrition is not good,
they’re not going to be healthy.”
Though the meetings are open to
both women and men who have lost their spouses, so far only widows have come.
“Most men our age are
working,” Louise Brown says. “And if they’re not working, it’s because
they’re disabled, whether they’re widowers or not.”
Besides that, there are five times
as many widows as widowers, according to national statistics.
Ann Simmons says Caring and
Sharing is off to a good start. “I think this year it probably will take off because
we have a good core group established,” she says.
n
The Caring and Sharing support
group meets on the third Wednesday of each month at 2 p.m. at the Rowan County
Agricultural Center at 2727-A Old Concord Road.
The next meeting is scheduled for
Jan. 19, when the topic will be Cold Weather Safety.
For more information, call Ann
Simmons at 633-0571. |
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