A post in which Poppy Brown is gone

Poppy Brown

I just talked to Lisa, and she told my Poppy died this afternoon. She called me because Mother is too upset to be on the phone right now.

It's a terrible thing for Granny, but honestly, he was in such bad shape that it was almost a mercy for him. In the last month he'd had shingles, the medication for which left him with a GI bleed. To stop the GI bleed, they took him off his blood thinners. When they took him off the blood thinners, he had a massive stroke. The best case scenario here would have left him paralyzed on one side of his body. He was already very impatient with being legally blind. It would have been terrible for him to be bed-ridden. When they went in to put in a permanent feeding-tube today and aspirated some fluid from his lungs, his blood pressure dropped to the point they could not raise it again. His kidneys had shut down last weekend, and his blood pressure dropped rapidly then too, but they put him on drugs to get it all going again then. Sometimes I think these new miracle drugs can be a curse.

Granny doesn't know yet. They're trying to get her sister, my Aunt Kathleen, to go over there to talk to her so she doesn't have to hear about it over the phone.

Poppy led a full life. He was married to Granny for 60+ years. They met when he drove a tractor past her house. That was a big status symbol in the small town they lived in. She was out in the yard with her sisters, and the prettiest one.

They were dating steadily (Granny had quickly thrown over her other beau to go out with Poppy) when he was drafted to fight in World War II. They married then. He missed her so much during basic training that he went AWOL and came back on the train before he shipped out to see her.

He bought my grandmother a bottle of Chanel No 5 perfume every Christmas.

He served his country as an Air Force pilot, and was the only one serving who was allowed to fly with glasses.

He came home after the war, and moved to Florida with my grandmother, settled down, and started a family. Three girls. My Aunt Kay, the eldest, my mother, and my Aunt Donna, the baby. They eventually decided to move back to Wilkesboro, NC. He had grown up on a farm and was no stranger to hard work. He went to work for Lowes building large commercial chicken coops. The work was blisteringly hot in the South Carolina low country and surrounding area. He came back to the cool mountains where he had been born and raised on the weekends.

He soon moved up to the sales department at Lowes, where his natural gift of gab and friendliness, as well as his reputation for hard-work and integrity made him a top salesman. He still knew half the town, even after being retired for years. The ones he didn't know personally, he knew their relatives. We never went into Lowes without someone who knew who he was helping us.

He built my grandmother a beautiful farm house with a complete kitchen in the basement so she would be cooler in the summer when she did her canning. He kept a small "gentlemen's farm" with a few cows, some chickens for fresh eggs, and whatever other animals took his fancy. He usually had a couple of horses, and showed Tennessee Walkers briefly. When the grandchildren came along there were ponies and goats. He also kept a garden, and grew his own vegetables and fruit, along with flowers. He had grapes and made his own wine.

He retired from Lowes, having worked hard all of his life, and prepared to enjoy his retirement. He bought an old house in town that had seen better days, and single-handedly gutted and restored it to its former glory. He re-modeled, re-wired, re-plumbed, sheet rocked, painted, and papered it until it suited Granny. They settled in to enjoy a retirement of travel and friends. Shortly after that, however, he lost most of his eyesight from a latent illness he had picked up years before. By the time it was diagnosed, he had 20% vision left in one eye. Always the handyman, though, he could feel his way through most routine jobs that had to be done. It was very frustrating for him when he couldn't do things, because he'd been able to do pretty much anything he wanted all of his life.

I'll never forget going shopping with him and my grandmother, and him getting me away from them to tell me he wanted to go to Sears. So off to Sears we went. He wanted to buy a chainsaw so he could prune the apple tree in the yard himself. I was trying to figure out how to talk him out of this when my mother caught us and put her foot down. He was legally blind by that time, and in his 80s. But he could probably have done it if he had gotten away with it.

He had an amazing sense of direction. Even years after he lost his vision, you could get out on the highway to take him somewhere, and he would know exactly where you were. When you got close to where you were going, he could tell you that the exit coming up was the one you needed to take, which way it was, and the name of the road.

He loved flowers. Even when they still lived on the weekend farm he kept while he was working for Lowes, he grew his own carnations. When they moved to the town house, he rooted cuttings from his prized rose bushes to move with them, and set out rows of exotically colored irises - many of which most people had never seen. He put out fruit trees in the yard. He could grow anything.

He never had to face life without my grandmother. He never had to go into a nursing home. He's been in his own home up until about two weeks ago. He passed with my Aunt Donna, his youngest daughter, holding his hand. All his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren loved him. He had the respect of the town he lived in. That's a pretty good life.

He was always a snappy dresser. He got up every morning and was fully dressed in slacks, shirt, and dress shoes, and smelling of after-shave, before my grandmother got up. I can still see him sitting in his chair in the den, waiting for the day to start.

He was a good, hard-working, honest man. I love him. And I'll miss him.