A Family Project — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER

A beacon from the American South and a bellwether for the nation.

A Family Project

After months of her living in an assisted care facility during the pandemic, a daughter and sons bring their mother home one last time.

Bringing their mother home to be buried on family land was the easy part. Together, they had to figure out the what, when, where, and how.<br>Words by Laurelyn Dossett<br>Photos by Molly McGinn and J. Scott Hinkle

February 10, 2022

My mother died on a bright Tuesday afternoon in August 2021. My three brothers and I brought her body home in the Prius and buried her behind the vegetable garden. My car, the gravesite clay, the tomatoes, the rims of our eyes — all red.<br>Our queen Lola Weldine, our lady of gumbo and chocolate pie, lived 80 full years. We were saddened by her leaving, but also glad that her suffering was over. Her 18 months in assisted living coincided with both the global pandemic and her personal struggle with Parkinson’s. We had not been able to care for her in person — so when she died, all we wanted was to bring her home.<br>I live on 40 acres in rural Stokes County, North Carolina. My three brothers, John, Bill and Jim, had come in from around the country to take turns sitting with mom during her last week. They quickly got on board with my idealistic suggestion of burying mom on my property, but they had reasonable questions about legality and logistics. If they also questioned my sanity, they didn’t show it.<br>I had known for some time that mom’s death would be coming sooner rather than later, and I had done my homework. There is nothing in North Carolina state statutes prohibiting home burial. The Stokes County Health Department sent me an email stating that no permit was needed and there was no minimum acreage requirement, but that the grave needed to be 15 feet from the septic tank, 50 feet from the well, and 10 feet from the property line. I think we would have figured out those bits about the well and the septic tank, but it was good and concise information, nonetheless. It was looking like bringing Mama home and burying her was not going to be illegal, as good a story as that might have been later.<br>The logistics of the burial were another matter. An early question was, “What do we bury her in?” The county had no opinion on this, either. I suggested wrapping her in only silk fabric or a quilt and laying her in the ground. But Bill adamantly replied, “It has to be a box.” I should have known that. Our father built fine furniture and had taught each of his sons his wooden art. There could be no better project for my brothers to do together than to build this vessel for our mother. Of course, I had all of the necessary tools, being my father’s daughter, but didn’t have any suitable lumber on hand.<br>When you think of neighbors helping during a family loss, you think of chicken casseroles and chocolate cakes. Not my neighbors. Wendi and Mark came by and insisted that I call if we needed anything at all. I am sure they meant to offer groceries or run errands, but they didn’t miss a beat when I asked them, “So … do you have any spare lumber lying around? My brothers are going to build mom a casket.” They offered us beautiful oak fence boards, heavy and brown with age. After they were deemed perfect, my brothers set about designing and building mom’s casket that very day.

Then there was the question of where exactly to dig the grave. My property is near Hanging Rock and Moore’s Wall, beautiful exposed granite rising up out of the green foothills of North Carolina near the Virginia line. That same granite sits not far beneath the surface of my land, except for this one particular spot where I also have a vegetable garden. Mom was an avid gardener, and this spot also overlooks a mountainside of mature oak and beech with an understory of mountain laurel and rhododendron. We decided this would be a fitting resting place, and we would be unlikely to hit solid granite.<br>Casket and gravesite solved, there remained the question of how to dig the grave. My brothers had some experience with this since they had helped dig the graves of our rural Alabama grandparents many years before. Depth of the grave was also unspecified by the county, and we were aware of the common “6 feet under” reference, so 6 feet it would be. John said we needed shovels with longer handles. My neighbor and handyman, Clifford, agreed. He was also on standby with his backhoe if we ran into a renegade boulder. He gave us more sage advice. “Dig it deep enough but not deeper than it needs to be. And don’t dig before it’s time.” So, we waited.<br>There was one last logistical problem to consider. We didn’t know how long the digging would take. And it was August in North Carolina. I spent a restless night obsessing over how we would keep her body cool between the time she died and the moment we laid her in the ground. My worry was for naught. We had a big rain on Sunday; the ground...