This is a picture of my great grandmother Alta Brinkerhoff Lillywhite. She passed away about 2 weeks ago at 4 months shy of her 98th birthday. We went up to Taylor for a funeral/memorial this weekend. It was really nice; she was an amazing lady. I Googled her looking for a picture to show Natalie and I got thousands and thousands of pages, mostly obituaries saying what a wonderful woman she was. She is survived by 465 descendants, who have served a total of 270 years of missionary service for the Church among other ridiculously amazing statistics.There can't be a family event without my grandma doing something silly. I love her to death, but she is a very funny lady. At the viewing, everybody kept saying how much Grandma didn't look like herself (being embalmed can have that effect, I hear, but I digress). It was decided that Grandma just didn't look right without her glasses, but no one knew where they were. Off went the uncles to look for Grandma Lillywhite's glasses, but my grandma came up with a better idea. She took her glasses out of her purse, and lovingly placed them on her mother's head. "Much better," she said. "Now she looks like herself." Well, the uncle found the correct pair of glasses not even 10 minutes later, and you should have seen the look on his face when he got back to the casket. "Who's glasses are these? I've got Grandma Lillywhite's right here, who's are these?!" Needless to say he was more than a little confused. Who says you can't have fun at a funeral?!
All the levity aside, it was a really spiritual memorial. No one could say enough about how great a person she was. My uncle Grant told the best story. In close to 50 years, the closest he ever heard Grandma Lillywhite complain was the week before she died. "The one regret I have is that I can't make it through 3 hours of church anymore." She definitely knew what was important in life, and tried very hard to teach all of her descendants to follow in her footsteps.
4 comments:
I had no idea you guys had a blog! I'm going to have to start reading it now that I know it's here! Our Grandma really was amazing! I wish we could have spent more time with her. I love your slide show thingy you'll have to teach me how to do that!
How great it is to have people we're descended from that we can look up to and teach our children about. Your great-grandma is probably visiting right now with my grandma who died a few years ago, there's some relation there I think.
Mindy just told me today about your blog - this is just getting way too time-consuming, but what a great way to keep up with everyone. I'm going to copy your slideshow thingy (as Mindy called it).
Hey, I didn't know you had a blog! It is fun to read about things and stay updated on you guys! I hope everything is going well.
oh my gosh! nat! you got a blog! yay! i have looked at your sisters and have looked to see if you had one! and now you do! yay! i am so glad you found mine! and you cut your hair! it looks so cute! how are you!?? fill me in! miss ya!
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