My cousin Bob wrote me that his older sister had died. She would have been 98 in July, 2012. What surprised him was that a large number of people came out for her funeral, held in the small LCMS church in her northwestern Illinois farmland area.
"She had no contemporaries," he said. "All her friends had died already. But people had loved her and they came, all ages came, to her funeral. Of course, she had five kids and they had kids and there were four generations of family, but friends and neighbors came, too."
Then my usually quiet and unemotional cousin Bob wrote that, when the service was over, the casket was carried across the road to the church cemetary. And as they carried my cousin Ann to her resting place, the church bells tolled 97 times, pealing out over the spring countryside. Not sad, but triumphant.
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