Aunt Gladys

Aunt Gladys

In the days since David asked me to do do a tribute to Aunt Gladys, thoughts and memories have been crashing around my head and heart.  What Can you say in five minutes or less about a woman like Gladys Irene Wert Yoder?

She was born to a school teacher Papa and a stay at home Mama. She inherited so much from her Papa.  A fine mind, the ability to teach, a love of music, and a sometimes-unconventional sense of humor.  From her Mama, she inherited her good looks, a culinary skill like no other, a love of her babies, and the ability to not only hold on, but triumph  when it felt like her world was crumbling beneath her and that life would never be okay again.

She may have inherited personality strengths through her genes, but there was a Grace that held her steady, and it never wavered. And it was she, saying “yes!” to that Grace, choosing to live in that Grace, that made all the difference in a life that could have been so different.

She was the fourth of eight.  It was The Depression, and life was hard. It was difficult to feed eight children on a school teacher’s salary, and at nine years old she went to work for an Aunt and Uncle to help out with their younger children.  She was often homesick and marginalized. The plan was for her to come home on weekends, but that sometimes didn’t work out and a little girl nurtured a sense of humor, learned skills, and came to trust a God that would walk with her through life events that would have stymied, crushed or destroyed many people.

She had a sister, just older than she, who became her confidant and also her sister in law when she married my Daddy’s youngest brother, Jesse, and moved to Delaware. 

Alene and Gladys.  Two peas in a pod. They had their own comedy show without trying.  Sometimes, they really were a hot mess! But they shared their deepest secrets, their acid disappointments, their broken hearts, their children and their shared memories of a childhood that, by today’s standards, was hard.  Aunt Gladys’s humor, sharper by far than my Mama’s, lifted burdens, made the hard days easier, and sometimes made husbands and children, nieces and nephews and even (maybe especially!) her own Mama, shake their heads.

There was a time when Uncle Jesse, Grandma Wert and Aunt Gladys were together, and Aunt Gladys said something that caused both Grandma and our very proper Uncle Jesse look askance.  I do not know what she said, and even if I did, nine chances out of ten, it wouldn’t bear repeating in this assembly. 

In any event, Grandma looked at Uncle Jesse and said, “I’m so sorry, Jesse.  I tried to raise her right!”

“It’s alright, Mama,” he said comfortingly.  “I’ve had her longer now than you did, and I haven’t been able to do anything with her, either!”

But quite honestly, neither Uncle Jesse nor any of us would have wanted her different than she was.  Besides always smelling so good, Aunt Gladys’s life was one of strength, vision, grace, forgiveness, and music.  But her best human quality was that she was full of love.  She loved God, Uncle Jesse, her family, her church, her friends, (not always in that order), but people in general.

Her love was a resource for my aching heart when there was no Mama for me to turn to.  Knowing she missed my mama as much as I did was comforting, and she somehow knew that I needed to hear the words of love she so freely gave.  Her welcoming smile and her hug and kiss were genuine and warm. In these last months, she was the one person who sounded disappointed when I answered the phone.

“Oh.  So, you are home.  I thought maybe you were on your way up here to visit us!  I prayed and prayed that you would come!”  (There is that’s one thing — She did know how to do what I call “The Lauver/Wert Woman Guilt Trip!”) but she never held the fact that we weren’t on our way up there against me, always ending every call with at least one, “Love you much!”

I never doubted it.  It was one of my anchors in a world that felt so out of control.  I knew that she, like all of us, would not be here forever, but I hated to think about it. In the days since she is “Over There” I’ve tried to think of the cloud of witnesses that were waiting for her, and of her joy to see and be with some of the people she loves so much. We know it was a glorious reunion, as she stepped from this body into the very presence of Jesus, free of the inconveniences and losses of this life.

But this past week, we sat around the table in that family dining room down Pleasant Cove Lane, and the voices were familiar, the laughter and the tears were present (as is common).  Uncle Jesse and most of her children and their spouses were there, and it was sweet. But there was a huge hole.

I felt it deeply, but somehow, it seemed that, If I listened hard enough, I could hear that cheerful voice calling back, “Love you much!”

I love you, too, Aunt Gladys.  I’ll see you in the morning.