Memory Monday: My Paternal Grandfather, A Man Who Suffered Much But Found Happiness

My Grandfather

A MAN WHO SUFFERED MUCH BUT FOUND HAPPINESS

Will Curry was my paternal grandfather. When I look at the picture above, I hardly recognize him. He looks so stern, sad, and almost hopeless. And then I think back on what I’ve heard about his life.

Here are some of the things I know about him:

--In 1904, his parents divorced when he was just a youngster. His mother, along with his sisters, left and moved to New Mexico with her new husband. He stayed with his father and his new wife (who was just about 10 years older than he was). At one time he left home because of the situation with her and moved in with his older brother—in the same town.

--At twenty, he married the woman he loved very, very much, but they had to wait for seven years for their firstborn (my father). They had a second child, a daughter, four years later. My grandfather was twenty-six and with two children—ages 9 and 4, when he became a widower. My grandmother developed double pneumonia and died. But he struggled through.

--Life was hard for my grandfather and his family. My father told me one of the jobs he had to do as a young boy for his father was to cut cardboard pieces to cover the holes in his father’s shoes so he could walk to the grocery store where he worked. There was just no money to buy new shoes or even to have them repaired. To make matters worse, sometime before 1930, his mother—now widowed—moved in with him, along with his late wife’s brother and his family. That made nine people living in a two bedroom house with a screened-in sun porch. (I know this house well. My grandfather still owned that house when I married. It was where we always went to visit him when we were growing up).

--When my father was sixteen, my grandfather married a widow. But things must not have been happy between my father and his step-mother, because my father went to live with his aunt and uncle in another town when my father was in his senior year of high school. My father never called his step-mother anything but “Myrtle” even though we always called her “Mamaw.”

--At approximately 78 years old, Papaw (which is what we always called him), left the home he had lived in for almost fifty years and moved into a nursing home with his second wife. She passed away in 1972—a week after I married, and Papaw moved in with my parents. He lived with them for two years before he fell, broke his hip and discovered he had cancer. He never left the hospital. He was 85 years old.

But the thing I remember most about my grandfather was how he learned to be content, even happy, after all the problems he had lived through.

Papaw and Mamaw

One last thing, our son shares the same middle name as my father, who shared the same middle name as his father. But my son also shares something else with his great-grandfather. Even though they never knew each other (my grandfather passing away in the mid-1970s, and my son not being born until the mid-1980s), they share the same birthday.