I am a daughter of my heavenly Father and born to earthly parents – Franklin and Louise Hatch East who loves me and I love them – I stand as a witness of God and the teaching my parents taught me at home.
November 27, 1976
I really feel it important to write some of my feelings of the past several months and also some of my experiences with my dear mother.
I'll start with coming home from Colorado. I was at the circle K Ranch from about 3 1/2 weeks. Not being very happy because things changed in the two years I had been gone on my mission and I think most of all I was worried mama would die and I wouldn't be there. So I came home planning only to stay a few days and go back but once home I decided my time with mama was much more valuable to me than the few cents an hour I was being paid at the ranch. Times when I could take care of my parents. I say parents because I feel Daddy needed me as much as Mamma did.
There is something of life and death and sharing these feelings that builds a bond of love.
There was the time of waiting on Mamma that made me appreciate mothers. Mamma had done "her business" in her beside "pot" and oh did it ever stink and she was so ashamed and had made such a mess that I would have to clean up. Actually just empty. She was apologizing for doing it. I told her not worry about it that I was sure she had cleaned many of my dirty diapers. This was my mom never wanting people to wait on her.
I than stayed with them until school started. I went home as often as possible – almost every weekend. The last 3 months when she was not in the hospital someone had to stay with her all the time. Her sisters took turns, Cora stayed one week and I went on home on weekends so her sisters (Aunt Jean & Aunt Vergie) could go home.
She went in the hospital for the last time in mid October. When she passed away on November 15 1976 in the Joseph hospital in Tucson Arizona she had been there for 5 days the doctors knowing less and less what to do for her. She has cancer for 7 years. I remember very clearly that first summer she had one breast removed. It was the summer of 1969, the fist summer I worked in Colorado. I had stayed up longer to close up the ranch, because ASU didn't start until the middles of September. Mama wasn't going to tell me about it until I got home but Diane told her she better write and tell me. The sequence of events and feelings I'll tell about some other place. She than has the other breast removed a year later. The next year something else after each of the operations she would recover very quickly and easily in the best spirit. "falsies" became a common joke with the family. Kenny speaking of them as her "equipment." I'm sure Mama had her moments of wondering about her life. But she never let anyone know. She was always so cherry and never conveyed the feeling of depression.
The spring of 1974 she had some cobalt treatments for some lumps on her chest. Because she had had so many in that area her body reacted. It burned the skin off. It was the ugliest sore I had ever seen and looked so painful. But when people would ask Mama about the pain she would bring up how the Japanese must have suffered when "the bomb" was dropped over there in WWII. She never felt sorry for herself. She would always be thinking of someone who was worse off than she was.
Soon after this reaction cleared up, her hip began to give her problems. She suffered with it until her next doctor appointment which was the day before we left to go to Utah for me to go into the mission home. The doctor took x-rays and told her to go ahead and go but to stay off it as much as possible. By the time I heard from her I was in the L.T.M. in Hawaii. Her hip joint was cracking because of some lesions (cancer) on the bone. In July of 1974 she had her hip operated on to put in some pins to keep the bone from cracking anymore. Then they gave her cobalt treatments to kill the cancer. This was when I was gone but people say she just never regained her strength back like had done before.
I would always receive letters from her she would never really tell me how she was really. Once and a while Daddy would write and tell me how she was. She was getting worse all the time. Finally in December of 1974 she sent a tape and from that tape I could tell just how bad she was. Her lungs would fill up with fluid which made her cough ass the time to enable her to breathe. The coughing made her so horse. She didn't even sound like my mother in the tape. On this tape which I kept she told me about how sick she really was, but most of all she told me about the special blessing given to her by bishop Dean Kart, and also she shared her testimony with me. Bishop blessed her that if she was to go soon the Lord needed her but if not soon she would get better.
Very soon after Larry Freidrichs called to talk to her about taking shakles food supplements. She started taking them very faithfully and she started gaining her strength back. I believe shakles helped to restore many needed nutrients in her body what had been lost or killed by the cobalt and other medication. Her body was just run down. But I know it was through faith, prayers and the power of the priesthood and modern medication that Mama lived 2 more years. She lived to see me come home and share in my experiences as a missionary and also she got to hold in her arms her first grandchild which she wanted to do so badly.
It seems, once her two dreams of seeing a child fulfill a mission and have grandchildren in this life were fulfilled she had other things to do. But she had lived her life as the Lord had asked so he was bound to bless as he tells in the D&C. Mama had complete faith in the Lord and an unconditional love as the Savior had for all of us. I remember the day before she passed away, Kenny and Diane and I were there visiting – she started having one of those coughing spells. She just couldn't breathe. She just too weak to cough the junk out of her lungs. All she could say was ok Heavenly Father help me. And she asked Kenny to pray for her. He said a prayer and soon she was able to settle down and breathe easier. She passed away November 15, 1976 after all us had been home and visited and all of us had gone back to our homes.
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