This December, my Advent theme is Hope. It’s my plan to share something each day leading up to Christmas. On this day, I include some words of women in my family about enduring difficult times. Knowing these stories and others from my family history gives me strength and hope to endure my own difficulties. I thank my Heavenly Father for these stories of hope.
“…We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things…”
The Articles of Faith 1:13
My Great-grandmother Della Griggs Stewart, who lived during the flu epidemic of 1918:
“The influenza epidemic broke out and [my husband] Del was very ill for two weeks. This was a terrible time for everyone. The high school was closed and turned into a hospital, cots were sent in and everyone available was called in to nurse the sick. I helped what I could, nursing some and helped take care of children whose parents had died or who were very ill. We had to wear masks; no one could come into town or leave. Our friends and neighbors were dying two and three per day. Our families were spared.”
My Great-great-great grandmother Fanny Fry, who traveled without family as a sixteen-year-old across the plains, pulling a handcart in 1859:
“At the Elk Horn River, my feet were so swollen I could not wear my shoes. Then when the swelling went out, my feet were so sore from the alkali that I never had on a pair of shoes after that for the entire journey…
“We had to pull up quite a long hill, and part of it was steep. In climbing we got behind one of the teams for the oxen to help us, for it was all we could do to keep it moving. Captain Rowley came up and called us lazy, and I did not consider we were at all.
“While pulling this heavy load, I looked and acted strange. The first thing my friend Emmie knew I had fallen under the cart, and before they could stop it, the cart had passed over me, and I lay at the back of it on the ground. When my companions got to me, I seemed perfectly dead. Emmie could not find any pulse at all, and there was not a soul around. They were, she thought, all ahead, so she stood thinking what to do when Captain Rowley came up to us. ‘What have you got there, Emmie?’ he said. ‘Oh my, Fanny is dead,’ she said. It frightened him, so he got off his horse and examined me closely but could not find any life at all. He asked Emmie to stay with me and he would go and stop the company and send a cart back for me, which he did.
“When I came to myself, my grave was dug two feet deep, and I was in a tent. The sisters had sewed me up to the waist in my blanket, ready for burial. I opened my eyes and looked at them.
“I was weak for some time after. I did not fully recover during the rest of the journey. Through it all I found I had a great many friends in the company.”
My mother, who had a brother wounded in the Vietnam War when she was a teen in 1968:
“I was 14 years old and Doug was 11. We were home alone because Mom and Dad were out on a Sunday drive, and two Marines knocked on our front door. Finding out that our parents weren’t home, one asked if they could wait in our living room. I stayed in the back TV room with Doug and was dying inside and praying so hard for Mom and Dad to get home. They did arrive a little later (seemed like two years) and when they pulled into the driveway, they saw the Marine Corps car and wouldn’t get out! Finally, I heard them come in the front door and from the hallway I heard, “He’s not dead!” That’s when I lost it and ran to the back room again. We learned that my much-idolized-by-me big brother was barely hanging on to life. I couldn’t speak. Well, that’s when the daily telegrams started that always ended: ‘RECOVERY QUESTIONABLE’. Weeks later, when my mom was at least 10 pounds lighter, the ‘RECOVERY EXPECTED’ telegram came. Elder Bruce R. McConkie, an Apostle in the LDS Church had been in Vietnam at that time and had given David a Priesthood blessing. Elder McConkie told Grandpa Que later that David’s healing was a gift from God and a miracle.
“David recovered and honorably served for twenty-nine years in the Marine Corps.”
