San Antonio Rose

At YouTube

My mother, Katherine Keith Chandler, took her last breath at 1:05 p.m. on January 19 in a small local hospital, though I think she’d been gone since shortly after six.

The story is that she called my sister Betty, who lived only about a mile away, at about 5:30 to come and call the ambulance. She wanted my sister, her first child and major caregiver, with her when she made the call. Mom had been sick last week and she mapped her 911 strategy out for me in one of the last telephone conversations I had with her. She wanted to live alone, caring for herself, but she didn’t want to get in that ambulance alone.

When the call had been made, she put on a fresh gown and combed her hair, and sat down to wait for the medics. My mother was always neat about her person.

The ambulance came, my sister said, sooner than she had thought possible. It was driven by Lannis Garnet who had rescued my mother and my father several times and who valued them both.

Still, by the time he got Mom to the hospital, she had stopped responding. My sister said her eyes looked blank and staring, with no light of recognition for her beloved first child. She was gone, though she breathed a few more hours.

She had a living will. She had specified no heroic measures. None were taken. But we had time enough to gather in and to be at her side when she breathed her last. Not just family came, but her Sunday school teacher, the cousin who had supplied her oxygen, her pastor.

Mother would have lived on if she could have. Her first great-great-grandson is due any day, and she wanted to hold him. But she had also wanted to die at home, in the house she and my father built in the 1930s from lumber salvaged from my Great-Aunt Fanny’s general store. She wanted to die in control of her own life and destiny.

So, though she didn�t just fall over at the lunch table the way my father did, she got close. In that she was lucky.

Shortly after she died, we met with the funeral home people. Mother had made all of her arrangements, which is a story in itself, but the time had to be set, the organist chosen, and the obit written — inaccurately probably—we were a baker�s dozen in that room all giving information at once. And, because we had been crying for hours, we were now finding reasons to laugh and tell old stories. That is my family�s way.

The blond young man in the suit and tie asked whether mother had a favorite song. �Yes,� said my brother Kenneth with a smile. And then, asked to name my mother�s favorite song, almost simultaneously, my sister, a church organist, said �How Great Thou Art,� and my brother, a fiddler, said �San Antonio Rose.�

The two sides of my mother and of my family.

Among all the lovely hymns of funereal flower arrangements that graced my mother’s funeral yesterday, I was delighted to discover that long-time friends who live near San Antonio had sent a vase of yellow roses. I think of them as Mom’s San Antonio Roses.

They�re on my table now and I smile to look at them, because they remind me of long friendship and of my singing, dancing, laughing mother.

Nobody but my fiddling brother and me remembered Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. But Ann Bush, an old family friend, gamely learned to play �San Antonio Rose� on the funeral home organ and the last two songs she played yesterday were, first, �How Great Thou Art� and then, last song of all, �San Antonio Rose.� �San Antonio Rose� in hymn time on a funeral-home organ. It was a dear moment.

So yesterday my mother’s pastor of twenty years, a man who loved her dearly, celebrated the Christian saint he saw in Katherine. He celebrated her as the excellent wife of Proverbs 31. And his picture of my mother was a true one. He called her a masterpiece, and she was that. He exhorted us to be aware of the master pieces we live among, and we must do that.

But today I want to celebrate Kitty, who danced.

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My deep thanks to all of you who’ve posted words of comfort. I have been comforted by them.

Bob Wills’s Ah-Hahs in the video above sound a bit like a mad crow but I wanted to post it because he is the original. I think the pedal steel originated with the Texas Playboys.

For a more modern interpretation, Asleep at the Wheel with Diwght Yokum. Or Patsy Cline.

If you want any more, you can Google it yourself.