More From Carol Thornton

In this photograph of my parents’ wedding day, my mother looks delighted and hopeful for the future. She couldn’t have imagined some of the hardships she’d face.

My parents raised nine children, the first six of us in a tiny one-bedroom home. My father felled the trees and milled the lumber to build the house, and incorporated windows and doors from the derelict building that had been my great-grandparents’ house. He planned to eventually build a larger house, at which time the small one would become a garage. A wood and coal stove provided cooking and heating facilities. In winter, beside the bed I shared with my sisters, frost would form overnight on the nail-heads of the wallboards. We had no running water or indoor plumbing, and no washer and dryer for the laundry produced by so many adventurous and often grubby farm kids.

Mom believed that good food was cheaper than medicine, and she grew a huge garden and canned the produce for winter. It would be many years before she gained the convenience of a deep-freeze.

Mom didn’t get much time for leisure, but she was intelligent, endlessly curious, and loved to read, and she passed those traits to us. When my youngest brother graduated, my parents were honored at the banquet for having sent nine children, all on the honor roll, through the local school.

For most of the early years, the only vehicle Mom had access to was the farm pick-up truck. It didn’t have room to transport six children, so we rarely attended church. But it was clear to each of us where Mom found her power. In a letter, she wrote that she’d “learned to lean on the grace of God. He never gives a load without giving the strength to carry it, and what more do we really need?” By my parents’ twelfth anniversary, the new house was finally ready, just in time for baby number seven.

Mom accepted with courage the chronic illness that eventually took her life. But when her youngest daughter, just twenty years old, died in a car accident on the way home from her summer holiday, Mom faced the most difficult challenge of all.

My mother earned no university degree; she didn’t write a book or head a major corporation. She might have done many things, but she chose to be our mother. Many times in my life, I felt sad that Mom had passed up various opportunities and wondered whether she regretted the many sacrifices she had made for us. Days before she died, she spoke her last words to me. Weakened as she was, it took her a great effort to pronounce them. “I know…my life…was meaningful.” Hearing her simple statement brought healing and banished regret. I’ll forever be grateful for the blessing of that sentence.