Ah, the familiar Alaska Airlines gate L1 in Chicago’s O’Hare airport. I’ve been here many many times. The flight out here and home by myself brought back to me all the trips I made to Rockford prior to my mom’s death in 2010. Certainly, I don’t regret them but they were exhausting and demanding. I didn’t go as many times as my brother and sister who lived in the Midwest. But I went plenty and a lot there at the end. The convenient loss of my job and my kid’s independence cleared my time so I was able to spend a lot of time those last six weeks.
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Having your parents pass is always difficult in ways you cannot see before you experience it. I did have a little come-apart when we couldn’t find their grave yesterday. I’ve promised a picture. I l8ikely can prepare it as I wait here at gate L1. My cousin’s husband Denny insisted that Mary Ann and I don’t wander around the cemetery by ourselves as it was in a ‘ bad’ area of town. So he met us there and the three of us looked at the usual Zunder/Weil/Baumann monuments. All of a sudden I just HAD to visit my parents site. We knew about where it was, on the flat area near the street right near that big tree. But the day was chilly and dizzly and the ground was covered with leaves. This part of the cemetery only has sones flat on the ground which meant covered with leaves. The three of us searched and searched, kicking away leaves, trying to remember where the graves were in relation to the tree. They had to be here; we had left them there, the stone had been 8installed, they hadn’t gone anywhere. Somehow not being able to find them upset me. So the three of use kept kicking away leaves and reading markers. The stones were in lines. Still we could not find them.
Finally, Mary Ann felt something hard under some leaves where she was not expecting and there were the stones. The trick is that the stones are in the middle of the row. We don’t know why. So, if anybody else goes to look, that’s the trick.
I am grateful for my cousin and her husband for tending these grave sites. I am grateful for my cousin and her husband for hosting my visit. I enjoyed meeting her grandchildren;l those boys were fun. Mary Ann and I truly spent 3 days on the ground reading and scanning and researching. One thing beside Abe Sevelewitz fell out. The last time we did a tour of the houses, Mary Ann had pointed out a blue frame house as Maier’s house. In the same Orange/Canner st neighborhood. But somehow I thought it should be bigger. We came up with other addresses that were in the original nine squares. Mary Ann reflected that she had always been told that that was the ‘Zunder house’, but maybe that was Theodore Zunder’s house (Maier’s son) not Maier’s. So that mystery still remains.
Also, some person (Vinick,who’s THAT?) put together those deteriorating scrapbooks of programs and newspaper articles which I scanned. A lot about the Board of Education but not a word about the German American Association and the celebrations at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, I’m sure it was written up.
Also some notes mentioned that Maier had been defeated in 1892 due to his position that those who were able, should pay for textbooks. Nothing about that at all.
Still, I have a lot of material.
Picture of Mary Ann and Denny searching for the grave sitel. I’m holding the camera and I’m searching too.
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