Grace

  My Aunt Grace died in 2008 in Atlanta.  It had been her home for many years.  Her husband was one of my father's brothers.  Aunt Grace lived in the social circles of Atlanta.  They lived in a nice part of town and had a log cabin in the backyard that they fixed up for guests.  She had shoulder length white hair, and I always thought she looked like George Washington, but I would never tell that to her face.  When she came to my father's funeral in Greenwood, she sat on the end of the front row.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw her and thought why is George Washington here.  Then, I saw it was Aunt Grace.

 She and Uncle Bill wanted to move out of Atlanta after he retired.  They found an old antebellum house that they said looked like "Gone With the Wind".  They were to sign the papers on a Monday.  The day before, it got hit by lightning and burned to the ground.  They saw that as a sign that they were meant to stay in Atlanta.

 After Uncle Bill died, she moved to Greenwood, SC.  We didn't know why, because she was kind of uppity, and Greenwood wasn't.  My grandmother had died, and there was no one from our direct family that still lived in Greenwood, so Aunt Grace wanted to make a statement that the Dursts were still in town.  We had been one of the founders of Greenwood.  The Durst name was to live on in Greenwood through Aunt Grace.  It was also strange, because she never really liked Greenwood.  She stayed there a while, but she missed Atlanta.  She moved back for good, and into an apartment building near downtown.

 When she was 94, she needed to renew her driver's license.  She drove a long Cadillac car.  She drove to the DMV in Atlanta traffic only to be told that she needed to get her glasses to pass the vision  test.  She drove back home and got her glasses.  This was who my Aunt Grace was.  Very feisty and self-reliant.  She was dying, and she told her pastor that only young people would come to her funeral, because she had outlived all of her friends.

 I got the news that she had died and planned to attend.  I rented a Kia to drive down from Greenville to Atlanta.  It was a good car.  She was being buried in an old and historic cemetery next to Uncle Bill.  The cemetery had been a Civil War battlefield.  Many of the elite were buried there including Uncle Remus.  Aunt Grace was right.  The ones that came were her relatives from south Georgia; some of her young neighbors from her apartment building; and me.  I represented the Durst side of the family.  

 Aunt Grace was one of a kind.  Every time that I see a picture of George Washington, I think of her.