At age 67, Lizzie Dickson was thrown into prison, put on a bread and water diet, and given a death sentence. Her “prison” that year of 1939 was bacterial meningitis.
Lizzie, my maternal grandmother, was legally known as Elizabeth Jane Matthews Hagewood Dickson. For long days she languished in her sick bed on a diet of “the bread of adversity and the water of affliction,” as Isaiah said (30:20). In 1939, bacterial meningitis was deadly. Few, if any, survived. Lizzie’s family doctor in the rural community of Neptune, Tennessee, was Dr. Cunningham, a blunt man with limited medication options. He did what he could and told the truth, whether you wanted to hear it or not. Lizzie would die. A sulfa drug or two were available, he said, but not for this disease. Opioids would blunt the pain but not cure. Penicillin was not released onto the U.S. pharmaceutical market until 1942. Meningitis would kill Lizzie. No medication in Dr. Cunningham’s leather satchel would stop it.
Bacterial meningitis is an infection of the meninges—the membrane covering and protecting the brain and spinal cord. Symptoms are severe headaches, high fever, and a painful and stiff neck with limited range of motion. It usually progresses quickly to confusion, bruising, rash all over the body, and severe seizures.
If Lizzie wanted to speak her last words, he told her she should do it immediately. So, before she worsened into unconsciousness and death, Mema—as we grandchildren called her—asked for a tablet and pencil and wrote a letter to her children. This is how she began:
To My Children
October 11, 1939
I am going to take a trip in the Good Old Gospel Ship, sometime before too long. In the summer of 1886 (age 14) I was saved. It was at Old Hand’s School House. Brother Binkley and Brother Hudgens was holding a meeting. I will never forget the place and the night the Dear Lord for Christ’s sake pardoned my sins. It is as fresh on my mind as if it was yesterday. My life hasn’t all been sunshine, but I never doubted my conversion at all.
Fifty-three years had passed since that church meeting at Old Hand’s School House, when her sins were pardoned and she was converted. But Mema was right. Her life had not been all sunshine.
She and her first husband, Nicholas Paschall Hagewood, birthed five children, two of whom died in infancy. Then when Mema was 35, Nicholas was struck by lightning in his farm wagon and killed instantly, along with the team of mules pulling the wagon. Their eldest son, a teenager, and a farm helper riding with Nicholas were uninjured.
Lizzie had three living children at the time of Nicholas’ death and another on the way. Four months later, a baby boy was born. She named him after his father, Nicholas Paschall Hagewood, or N.P. as her son was always known. After several years, Mema married again, this time to James Carney Dickson. They had two children, my mother Mary and my Uncle Jim. A dozen years later, when my mother was ten, James died of tuberculosis. Widowed a second time, yet unmarred by self-pity, Mema carried on, ran the farm, raised the children, and served the Lord.
No, not every day of Lizzie’s life had been sunshine, but all were drenched in the grace of Jesus, as one writer said. None of those days had been a bread-and-water death knell until 1939 and bacterial meningitis.
My mother remembered Mema’s illness well, especially the letter Mema wrote. It was about 350 words, and Mother read it to me when I was a child. Halfway through, Mema wrote:
I had the faith of the two blind men who cried out, saying, “Thou Son of David have mercy on us.” So, he had mercy on me and by his help and my faith I was saved. I had a hard time raising my dear children but he never left nor forsaken me….I didn’t know what to do and this passage of Scripture came to me that He had promised to be a husband to the widow and a Father to the orphan and I just trusted Him and He gave me faith and strength to work and raise them. I tried to raise them right so we will be an unbroken Family around His throne in Glory.
I hope and pray my dear children will all meet me in Heaven where there will be no good by.
Mema lay long languishing weeks near death, yet despite Dr. Cunningham’s dire warning, she rose from her deathbed and lived again. Months passed before full recovery. My mother’s most vivid comment about the recovery was that Mema “had forgotten how to walk.” As Mother described the process, it was not weakness and debilitated muscles that prevented her from walking; Mema’s brain had literally lost the muscle memory of how to walk.
In simple terms, muscle memory is a neurological process that allows us to perform certain motor skills without even thinking. Mema’s neural pathways for walking had disappeared completely. But with a son on either side to hold her up, she began. “Mother,” they said, “move your feet—one foot, other foot, one foot, other foot—left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.” Gradually, Mema rebuilt those neural pathways. As Mother said, “They taught her, held her up, and finally, she walked again.” Mema lived to be 92, despite other periods of “the bread of adversity and the water of affliction” and dreary days with no sunshine.
Mema’s bout with bacterial meningitis is one of many “back-yonder” stories about the faith, perseverance, and grace my family has experienced. Our oldest son Jeff knows many of these stories.
He labels them his godly heritage and often reminds me how grateful he is for God-fearing, God-living relatives who came before us.
What about our own “back-yonder” stories? We need to tell them, as both the Old Testament prophets and the psalmists remind us. Isaiah said a father makes the Lord’s truth known to his children (38:19). At least a dozen times in Deuteronomy, Moses told the people to remember and often he added tell…teach…talk…write… regarding what God had done for His people. Echoing Isaiah and Moses, Leroy Brownlow said in A Psalm in My Heart: “Handing down the praise of God from generation to generation is a sacred trust. …a sacred charge…a divinely enforced duty.”
David, Asaph, and the other psalmists were big tellers of “back-yonder” stories. “I will remember…I will ponder your works of old. …the years long ago,” they said. See Psalms 77 and 78 for examples of their stories.
These storytellers do not recount the past to revisit “the good old days” or to slide into nostalgia or sentimentality. They testify of the past to rewind, as a seamstress with a bobbin of new thread to sew a garment—to press on with something new, something good, true, and holy. Telling “back-yonder” stories is like that, and to change metaphors from seamstress to farmer, it’s not like plowing a field while looking behind you. “Back-yonder” stories teach us how to look ahead like those behind us did, how to plow a straight row in new ground, how to press on, how to go forward with the Lord.
I love the follow-up Isaiah gives to the bread and water passage: “Though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction…thine eyes shall see thy teachers. And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it…” (30:20-21). That’s what “back-yonder” stories do—both from Scripture and from our own lives. We must speak them, teach them, and write them so our own eyes, our children’s eyes, our grandchildren’s eyes, and our friends’ eyes can see and our ears can hear our Savior’s message: “This is the way, walk ye in it.”
Tell those stories!
About the Writer: Brenda Evans lives and writes in Ashland, Kentucky. You may reach her at beejayevans@windstream.net.
