The last time your name is ever spoken

Someday someone on Earth will say your name for the last time. Your name will never be spoken again.

Fame can buy some of us some extra time, but we all inevitably face the same end. Even the names of Abraham Lincoln, Moses, and Mother Teresa will someday never be spoken again.

When it comes to your name or mine, it likely will happen sooner than we think. It could even be at our funeral service that our name is spoken aloud for the last time.

Considering how loving my own family is, it is astounding to me how little we actually speak the names of our loved ones who have passed on.

Think about it. Notice it within your own family. How often are the names of beloved deceased family members ever actually said out loud?

We likely think about our dearly departed often. Or so it seems to us. But no matter how beloved our deceased family and friends may be, time does its dance on all our minds. Whether we want to do so or not, we begin to think of those who have passed away a bit less often. Little by little, it happens. The tiniest and softest raindrops will eventually erode even the largest and strongest boulder.

I accept the fact of fading memories for us all. But far harder for me to wrap my mind around is how rarely we actually say the names of our deceased loved ones out loud.

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This past week I visited a friend in the Bristol Hospital. I was told by another friend that she was very sick. In my mind, I thought I had a little time to spare (surely she wouldn’t die in the next few hours, I reasoned - I had just seen her at Christmastime and she didn’t look “that bad”). So I went on a hike. When I finally got to her hospital room the picture below met my eyes.

Marge Hensley was dead.

The nurses on duty told me they had carried her body away just before I got there.

I will say her name out loud. Right now.

Marge Hensley.

Marge’s eldest son, Buddy (pictured in the center below) and I were Bristol’s first ever Big Brother/Big Sister mentorship match in 1985, when he was a child. Buddy Hensley and I have stayed friends ever since, some forty years hence.

As his mom’s health grew poor some years back, Buddy began to take care of her night and day. His little brother, Eddie, was always there for her too. Good sons they both were.

Rough and rowdy the Hensley boys did live their lives. One glance at the picture of them below and the word “rowdy” jumps out at you, plum off the page. (By the way that Santa in the pic is yours truly.)

I taught the boys’ father, Jerry, at the Bristol Jail back in the ‘90s. Their dad spent most of his adult life incarcerated.

So Marge was left to raise the boys - a job at which I think she did admirably well. Both boys are known to be hard-working, honest, and friendly; three universally admired qualities in any culture at any time.

Yes, the boys may have dropped out of high school. Yes, they may have smoked a lot of marijuana back in the day (strange that the same behavior that once gained them years in prison is now completely legal). They may or may not represent everyone’s idea of “model citizens”, but I am highly inclined to count any hard-working, honest, friendly soul amongst us as a great success.

Without Marge Hensley as their mother, Lord only knows what would have become of these boys. Even if she didn’t have much in the way of material things, she always gave her boys what she could.

Marge taught the boys not to lie, cheat, or steal (not so much by words, but by example). No matter how destitute the family became at times (and they did face some mighty hard times - I saw it firsthand), Marge somehow always found a way to scrape an honest living out of completely thin air.