The Old Old Story

Our Family Reunion

Betty and I found Gordon and Florence Queen, my great grandfather and grandmother’s gravestone yesterday located in Oak Grove Church Cemetery in Morganton Georgia.  It was a beautiful afternoon, mild, sunny and the church lay up a mountain ridge in the woods and graveyard stretching on behind.  It dawned on me that church members take up a lot more room in the graveyard than they did in the church; there is a lesson there somewhere.  They died old, both in the 1980s.  I was married with children and helped carry Granny Queen's casket up the hill to where we buried her.  I remember laboring under the load; another lesson there.  One thing that haunts me this morning is how little I knew about these people even though I had met them many times, slept in their home, ate at their table. I didn’t even know their first names until seeing it on the stone, knowing them only as Granny and Pappy Queen.  I long to know them now, their hopes and dreams, favorite food, greatest tragedy, longings, and loves but I only know their gravesite.  When we were leaving I told Betty I guessed this is what old people do, prepping for our time.  They had 10 children, my grandmother Claudella Gentry along with the other nine names carved on their stone.  All but one of their sons was buried with them, one a baby barely a month old, another 21, murdered and never found, marked only by a small stone.  The lone son is buried in a military gravesite I know not where.  I will take my family out there this evening, we will sit around the stone and I’ll tell the “old, old story…” of our family long gone and of the family now and our hopes for the Family Benson to come and all grafted into the Great Family of God and “…of Jesus and His love.”