“A good name is better than precious ointment, And the day of death than the day of one's birth ...” ~Ecclesiastes 7:1
After it was all over, Dan sent me a one-line email. I could pretty much quote it in its entirety:
“One question: Did gramps kick?”
It was ten years ago, in March of 2011, when I got the word. Aunt Jackie called because Grandma Ware had herself passed away only a few months earlier. Grandma’s side of the family had dealt with that funeral, and now Jackie sent for me.
Immediately after Mom died in 2007, I had a phone conversation with Grandpa Ware. He wanted me to know that he was changing his will. He was disinheriting most of the people in his life. Only Aunt Jackie and I would receive anything after the bills were paid – not his step-great-grandson Willie, whom he had raised, not my brother Dan nor my sister Rennie, and certainly not my mom’s husband John, whom he had never liked. Aunt Jackie would get half of everything and I would get the other half. Jackie would be the executor. Originally, it was supposed to be Jackie (Grandma’s daughter) and my mother (Grandpa’s daughter), but now that my mother had preceded Grandpa in death, he was passing that along to me instead.
Grandpa’s wealth was legendary in our family. He had been a real estate mogul who made his fortune by leaving Missouri and going “Out West” with his small family – his first wife Audentia and my mother Margaret – to California, where he “never had to miss a day’s work.” It was hard work and ingenuity that had him buying up houses that had to be removed when a new highway was being built, paying to have them transported to a nice neighborhood, and making the necessary improvements, so that the house would sell at a decent profit. Grandpa was one of the original California “house flippers.” He was also the first mayor of Hawaiian Gardens.
I found this picture of Grandpa, with his mother Jenny June, for some city ceremony. It looks like he had the means by that time to fly her out to California, and probably bought her the fur as well, since she and Grandma Pearl both had one.
Grandpa is third from the right, with his wife and his mother seated.
Our family often spoke of Grandpa being a millionaire and everybody wondered if someday we’d inherit something. But half of his wealth really didn’t cross my mind. I only knew that he loved it when I would call him and give him news about our big family and I rarely asked him for money. And when he told me the news about his will, I felt honored, but I told him I wasn’t after his money, I just loved him for who he was – not Mayor of Hawaiian Gardens, but the man who was my ancestor.
So our talks on the phone continued unchanged. He had to use a phone that amplified my voice, since he was getting pretty deaf. Towards the end of his life, he told me he wasn’t sure why he was still here, because he wasn’t good for anything – that he couldn’t see or hear, couldn’t drive a car, and the family wouldn’t even trust him to walk to the store and buy something anymore. They told him he was a crazy old man now. What was he good for?
I felt so sorry for him! Of course, it’s better to feel needed, and rather humiliating to fall from being a wealthy and powerful, influential City Father to being an old man with Alzheimer’s. So I appealed to his status as my Brother in Christ. The man had supposedly been saved longer than I had been alive. He spent most of his time now watching televangelists on TV because he couldn’t get to a church service. And he was profoundly longing for the end of his life so he could spend eternity in Heaven.
“Why am I still here?” he would pitifully ask me.
“Because you are still needed here. Perhaps it is so you can pray for our family. You can always do that.”
“Oh I do that every day,” he assured me. “But then what?”
“Pray again!”
Then he began to fall – too often. Grandma couldn’t pick him up – she was too weak for that. Between the two of them, they just couldn’t live alone anymore. So Jackie made arrangements for a nice nursing home for them. They were on different floors because Grandpa was an Alzheimer’s patient, but now and then, they could see each other. Jackie made sure to drive out where they were fairly often, and when she did, she would read to Grandpa, from his favorite Bible.
Jackie got pretty exhausted, as she was still working as a landlord, but making time to see her mother and Grandpa, whom she loved like her own father. Considering she didn’t even know her real father, he was all she had ever known, and she had been there for him, when my mom was in Alaska and couldn’t be with him, and none of the rest of our family were close.
After Grandma died, and Jackie and her family had dealt with her burial, Grandpa seemed to just be more tired than ever. She told him, “Now don’t you go and die on me too – I need you.” To Grandpa, those were magic words. He lived because Jackie needed him. But he was so tired!
Then, there came a day when she just knew that she was only saying that out of selfishness. She looked at him and his haggard countenance, and knowing he had been refusing food, finally said, “You just want to go home, don’t you?” When he nodded, she said, “Then you go ahead. It’s all right – you don’t have to stay here for my sake.”
That evening, after Jackie left, Grandpa Ware passed on to the next life. It was only a few months after his wife had passed. He was 95.
I hadn’t been able to talk with him on the phone at the nursing home. So I was deeply grateful to Jackie for what she had done. Because she was there and knew what she was doing, she made all the funeral arrangements, as well as the arrangements for me to fly out to California with Eric. I had to try to find a short-sleeved black outfit at the local Wal-Mart, which wasn’t quite ready for spring yet, and even so, black was not your typical spring color.
Nobody told my brother and sister. We figured they probably wouldn’t have come anyway. But Cousin Rod and Cousin Terri came, along with their spouses and children. Cousin Willie drove out for the funeral because he was really sure he would get some money for his trouble, but Jackie had to show him in the will that he was specifically excluded. He did get some tools. But he was … well, “disappointed” is putting it mildly, that he didn’t get more.
There was the question of the obituary. Jackie wanted my input on that one. It would have been cool to have listed all his descendants, but for one thing, our own family had already gotten rather large, and to be fair, we would have had to list Rennie and Dan’s families’ names too, and then Grandpa’s step-children and step-grandchildren, et al. Rennie and Dan didn’t want to be in contact with me and had hidden their address information, so we couldn’t even find out exactly how many descendants Grandpa had, or all their names. Some of it, we just guessed. And we kept the descendant list pretty generic, especially after we found out how much the paper wanted per word! Here’s what we came up with.
While there in Southern Cal, Eric and I visited Lee Ware Park, just to see what it looked like. It was pretty old and decrepit, and from there, you could see the highly graffitied walking bridge over the river, which had been padlocked due to gang violence. Eric played tether ball with a local kid and I examined everything, the monuments to my famous ancestor.
And he was famous, in his corner of the world. He had been Grand Marshall at a parade, as an honored City Father, and my mother had pictures in her scrapbook. This might have been a Bicentennial parade, but it was probably for an anniversary of the City of Hawaiian Gardens.
Aunt Jackie with Grandpa Ware, as Parade Grand Marshall
The funeral itself, outdoors at Forest Lawn, was fairly simple, even if John Denver made the place famous for their ability to go overboard. Though Grandpa had bemoaned the fact that all his friends had already died of old age, there were still a good number of people who came. It felt strange and I wondered how many people were pointing and talking about me, this stranger from Indiana. Eric remembers that we sang “Amazing Grace” at the funeral “because your family sings.” I remember that I spoke. Jackie wanted me to say a few words, so I scribbled an outline on a piece of paper and winged it.
Here’s what I said, in essence:
Grandpa Ware was generous. He always gave money whenever anyone asked it of him, because he felt God had called him to do that. (Which actually was a bit of problem, considering how much money the televangelists snookered out of him.)
Grandpa Ware loved to help people. He was always available to fix something, like when he came to Indiana to visit and ended up replacing our toilet.
Grandpa Ware was a Christian. He had been a Sunday School teacher for much of his adult life, and he knew he was going to Heaven when he died.
So, if you would honor his memory, be like him. Be generous with the gifts with which God has entrusted you. Help others. And above all, receive Jesus Christ as your Savior. That’s how you can see him again someday.
I spoke passionately about these things because they were things I believed in, and when I was finished, the pastor said he thought I’d said everything he wanted to say already. Other people spoke up, including the current mayor of Hawaiian Gardens, and there was a certificate bestowed upon us, honoring my grandpa and how much he meant to the City Council and the people.
Jackie had some things she thought I should have, that she had saved back for me. She gave me his favorite Bible, one my mother had gifted him with many, many years ago. The cover was in shreds, and he had “mended” it with scotch tape that had turned brown over the years. He had large thick round plastic tabs adhered to the fore-edge of the page, for indexing. Those were also acidic, like the tape. When I got back from the trip, I handed it to our bookbinders and said, “Fix it.” And because Grandpa had underlined favorite verses and written on the pages, I bonded with the Bible with its new goatskin cover and added my own notes alongside his.
Jackie also gave me some of his favorite pictures, including one of his mother, one of himself as a young man, and an oil painting he’d made, of a mountain in Austria or Germany.
As for his house, Grandma and Grandpa had laughed one year, when I had done some mail-order Christmas shopping, and not knowing what to get them, I had sent a young grapefruit tree. They didn’t know why anyone would send a grapefruit tree to a place teeming with grapefruits already. But it was planted in their backyard, and by now, it was huge and had given them hundreds of the tasty fruits.
Grandpa had made improvements to his house that were substandard and wouldn’t pass inspection. Jackie had to rebuild walls, treat for termites, have re-wiring done and more, before she could put the house on the market, and even then, she apologized for the low price she had to accept for its sale. The neighborhood just wasn’t a great one. Grandma and Grandpa had gotten used to the fact that they had to have iron bars on all the windows, and that drive-by shootings made their front yard unacceptable for kids to play in or people to be seen. But Jackie was somewhat distressed when we passed the property and I pointed out the large spray-painted graffiti on the wall around the front yard.
I did understand that very little would ever bring me back to Southern California, so I took what felt like a final tour of the place, where I used to walk when I was a child, and where I rode my bike when I was in high school. Eric and I walked to Artesia High School, where we had our “Jesus for Lunch bunch” that met under a tree. Some fellow-students left the campus in those days, to frequent local fast food places during their lunch hour. Now, we found a closed campus with a high security fence. That probably cut down on the amount of drug dealing, but it was every bit as disturbing as the fences in Washington, D.C. earlier this year. I was not used to seeing that.
But the worst scene from my walking tour occurred when we went to find the site of Grandpa’s apartments, where I lived when I was eight, and where I popped pomegranate blossoms and had chicken pox and mumps. Both Grandpa’s old house and all his apartments were missing, and in their place was a large casino.
How fast deterioration takes place! How fast the rot sets in and spreads! Every kind of sin and shame radiates from a den of iniquity like this. Organized crime is always rampant wherever these “businesses” show up. And I must admit that in the beginning, when President Trump ran for office in 2016, the image of the casino in my head made me disdainful of this man, who capitalized off of gambling and related vices. I did talk to Jackie about the casino, though, and she told me that Grandpa had wanted to sell off his property. He approved – he wasn’t forced out. There was no “eminent domain” connection. I was still not content, but it is what it is.
So then there was the question of the inheritance. We found that in Grandma and Grandpa’s latter years, they used very little of their money on themselves. The interest rates were very low and they could no longer live on that income. They were loath to dip into the principal. So, if their dishwasher broke, they just went without. But they gave away money whenever they could, and there always seemed to be a need. They really really did not want to use up their life savings on a nursing home.
So now what to do with this, now that it was in my hands? We discovered that even a large amount of money in the bank might only have net earnings of a few dollars a month by then. And it wasn’t much better putting it in a Certificate of Deposit. Stock market? Well, maybe some of it. But by and large, we discovered that for investment purposes, the best way to use the sum of money entrusted to us was to invest in the currency of the Kingdom of Our God rather than the Kingdom of This World.
Well, first there was the tithe. We found many good Christian charities that needed funds, and we were able to spread out the tithe amongst them, with a good chunk going to our church. We were able to send Eric on a trip to Israel as an investment in his ministry.
Ayelet’s sister Naomi, the group’s tour guide
And we also invested some funds in the building we used as a church in Delphi.
We paid off all debts on our home and business and bought another house that came up for sale a couple blocks away from ours, because real estate is another way to invest money. For a while, we rented it out, until we needed it for our business. We may end up moving into it, if we ever get to the point where one of us is unable to climb stairs, but that would be sad.
You see, we also made improvements on our own house that made it into what we’d been wanting it to be for a long time, which included building an addition on the back for an office for Eric and a shipping and receiving area, an expanded and remodeled kitchen, moving the bathroom and adding a second one, replacing our roof with metal, and re-wiring so we could get rid of the old fuse box in the basement, which had been dangerously close to being covered by flood waters a time or two. We dreamed of other things, like connecting the garage to the house with a skywalk, and building a new shop in the back, but those never came to pass.
These and other improvements both improved our lives and blessed others with needed work. Every little job was an investment in the lives of people, from those who laid the foundation for Eric’s office to those who used a sledgehammer to take out the old, broken sidewalk. Eric met one of those people from the past at Chris’s wedding last Saturday. As our own Pastor Joe is so fond of reminding us, the only two things that will last for eternity are The Word of God and people.
And, we invested in Leonard’s. We needed new typeset and a new imprinter, so we took the opportunity to do just that. The stock market is all about investing in another business that you think or hope will be successful. Even with much study of the company, it is very similar to gambling on a race horse. But when you have a business of your own that’s on a roll, and it’s supplying a living for precious people, investing in that business is priceless.
Grandpa would have been very pleased with all these things. He knew about Dan’s choice to invest in the meth lab that almost killed himself and his wife. And he knew that my siblings hated him. But Eric and I became the way for him to fund projects for the Kingdom of God in absentia.
The Book of Revelation describes the destruction of the coming global economic system. It is described as Babylon the Great, and is pictured as a woman riding a beast. It is totally destroyed in a single hour, and while the kingdoms of the earth weep over its destruction, the multitude in Heaven celebrates. And they sing the victory song very familiar to the Haley Family, the song of The Hallelujah Chorus:
And I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude,
as the sound of many waters and as the sound of mighty thunderings,
saying, "Alleluia! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigns!”
~Revelation 19:6
And it will not be long before this verse, also in The Hallelujah Chorus, comes to pass.
"The kingdoms of this world
have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ,
and He shall reign forever and ever!"
~Revelation 11:15
My grandfather’s death is controversial, disputed. And if you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know there’s the “other side” of Grandpa, that I didn’t write about in this post. I’ll be revisiting that next week. But one thing is as certain as the autumn that follows summer:
It is high time to get on the economy of the Kingdom of God. That currency will last and doesn’t suffer from inflation, theft, or a stock market crash.
Even so, Lord Jesus, quickly come!
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