Not in the book — told aloud in a recorded conversation, December 2017
My mother was fourteen when her mother died, in October 1927, back in Poland. She had hurt herself lifting the big potato bags onto a wagon — her appendix burst — and within days she was gone. She lay in the porch for three days, and they buried her on a Saturday afternoon.
Her brother, Uncle Arthur, was away in the army, and it took him a long time to get home. The way my mother wrote it down, he arrived just when sundown came, as they were about to close up the grave. So they dug her open again, because he wanted to see her and to say goodbye.
The way she told it to her grandson, years later, Arthur came in the night, after his mother was already buried — and he and her father opened the grave so he could say his goodbye.
Either way, it was all very, very sad. Those were her words.