Shattered hearts, deep grief, and a reminder Death is always present even if out of sight, out of mind
Ada Jane Harvin, 2024-2025
She was my First Cousin Twice Removed, caps for emphasis, and I never met her in person. Tragically, Little Ada didn’t live long enough. Even so, I eagerly albeit quietly waited for another round of pictures and updates from that particular branch of my Mother’s family as I more or less stopped using social media sites such as Facebook many years ago. Plus these beloved relatives live in the middle of Tennessee while I live about 2,430 miles away out in Seattle, Washington. The last time I visited these relatives in their home state was with my daughter Morgan, now Dylan, back in April 2007. The last time I’ve seen Ada’s Dad, Taylor, my First Cousin Once Removed, along with his father Mark, my First Cousin, was in San Antonio, Texas, for our Uncle Al’s funeral back in November of 2021. Before then, Taylor was just a little boy to me, and now, well back in 2021 he was all grown up, finished with grad school, married, and working in a creative, high tech career. We got along great, chuckled over various topics, and chatted about all kinds of things. It was great reconnecting with my Harvin cousins Debbie and Mark, too, and my Aunt Marianna and Uncle Larry.
Marianna was my Mama’s second sister. They were born about 10 and a half years apart during a time of global depression and a terrifying world war. My own Mother had passed from a long, rough battle with cancer back in November 2006 on my brother’s birthday, a couple of years after Dad died, also from cancer. Family was and is important to me even tho I was the one who moved far away from my native Virginia and the Carolinas out to the Pacific Northwest and was once deemed the Black Sheep. Yes, family is complicated. Keeping everyone and everything connected somehow became more and more complicated as our lives, easier in so many ways from older generations, became filled with “busy busy busy too busy” and distractions such as computers, the Internet, and smartfones. In the midst of it all, a darling precocious little baby girl cousin I looked forward to meeting passed away before such would ever and now never happen.
Ada was my Aunt and Uncle’s first great-grandchild. She was my cousin Mark’s and his wife Susan’s first grandchild. And Ada was my First Cousin Once Removed Taylor’s and his wife Sarah’s first child. Started to say, “only” for each term of relationship except Sarah is expecting her second child, thought to be another daughter, sometime in the Fall.
My Aunt texted me and my siblings early Sunday afternoon on the 29th of June our little cousin-cousin-cousin “died suddenly in her sleep.” The cause was unknown, tho there was some speculation about this or that. From my own research, Ada was too old for SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, as she’s not quite yet a year and a half. There’s SUID, however, Sudden Unknown Infant Death, an unsettling and scary odd term reserved for those who perished too old to be labeled with the other acronym. Truth is, we just do not know.
Meanwhile, my brother Joe and sister Beth, both who still live in rural Virginia, and I vigorously debated going to the funeral, arguing over how far we’ve all grown apart while juggling the challenges of logistics and finances. The Fourth of July holiday weekend was coming up, travel was a mess, I still had a full time job including working on the 4th, thunderstorms and tornadoes and heat waves yadda yadda piñata there was one thing bursting and spilling out after another including prior commitments. I really, really wanted to go, but needed to work as I had lots of medical bills, had just paid for my oldest daughter to fly out from New York City while my wife is flying without me to her family reunion in North Carolina as I stayed home so she could go. Plus we had recently bought a new 2025 car before Trump’s tariffs hit. Flying out there would cost me over $900 plus add in a car rental, lodging, meals, et cetera, etc., as estimated expenses quickly compounded to $1,500 to $2,000. Ahh, it was just too much.
So went to buy sympathy cards instead. Stared at walls of cards. Another person, a woman about my age, was doing the same thing, picking thru the cards, looking at them, and putting them back in their slots. Gosh, I felt overwhelmed, and I was just a distant relative on their family tree. My hand reached out, finally, and picked this one and that one and three more. Bought five sympathy cards. Then agonized for the rest of the day and early the next morning over what to say to faraway loved ones beset with such deep and world shattering grief. Eventually I chose three and began to write. When all was said and done, I drove to the closest US Post Office and mailed them priority mail. As the 4th of July was a holiday, my dear relatives would get them by Saturday at the earliest, the day of Ada’s funeral, or the following Monday. Oh, God. Well. Okay. Life is messy. Yes, life is messy, but death is final. My little cousin’s sudden transition left a big, yawning void in the family fabric. More of a tear, a rip in spacetime. another link broken between people once close in childhood but who live far apart as adults. This link, however, and all of these metaphors refer to what was once a warm, breathing, laughing, eating, pooping, crying, giggling little girl.
But who was she? Who was Ada Jane as a person? As a Human Being as whole and complete as any centenarian? What was this person like? For she was far more than just a sweet little girl. Didn’t matter she was only a child. Below is an excellent memorial to this fellow Human, my First Cousin Two Times Removed. Her parents crafted it. I don’t know if others contributed, and as my Aunt texted, Ada’s Mom and Dad “did a good job.” Here it is below with another link posted further down in Resources:
Little Ada’s public obituary, crafted with love and adoration by her parents with a copy texted to my siblings and me by her paternal grandmother, my Aunt Marianna.
Reading it left me in tears. Every time. Sobbing. Tried to imagine such grief and failed. Having raised three little girl babies up into adulthood, I all too well understand every parent’s deep dread, that primal fear of such utter loss. Never had the loss, and hope and pray dear God I never do. As the oldest, as their Dad, I should go first. I want to die well before any of my kids. Don’t have any grandchildren yet. Don’t know if I will, tho I suspect eventually they may occur. Am already 66 and was a tad late to parenthood. Those are tales for another time. But now I weep for little Ada, and her parents, and her grandparents, and her great-grandparents. I sob for my cousins and other relatives so sadly affected, too. Can’t help it. Too empathic. Too sensitive. And doesn’t matter as its not about me, but about her, yet I feel it, yes, I can feel the energy, those vibrations of grief, emanating out across the psychospiritual ether of the noosphere like gravity waves undulating thru spacetime from two black holes colliding one into the other.
We’ve all become too distant from terrible Death. The history of our species around the world is filled with the deaths of so many children. Death was known and recognized as it walked among us and sat next to us and stood there behind us, watching, waiting, and then taking. With astonishing advances in modern science and medicine, we pushed Death aside. And people lived longer. And worked longer. So we put the elderly and the feeble into special “homes” to die out of sight. Aging is now recognized as a disease, a complex of diseases. Significant research on longevity, age reversal, and healthier management of aging shoots past gerontology like a big, giant rocket to Mars.
Where I grew up on Riverview Dairy Farm in rural Prince Edward County, Virginia, during the latter half of the 20th Century, there were the remains of an even older farm there from the mid-19th Century. The Waltons family, they were. Maybe even remote ancestors of some relatives who married into some distant branches of my own family tree. Just don’t quite know. On a hill there were three or four graves. Old snaggletoothed, mossy tombstones with carved, eroded lettering. They had dates inscribed from the 1850s. One year, 1854, sticks out. Or was it 1852?
One grave was Mary Walton. beloved wife of Samuel Walton and mother of those deceased children. The other graves were all kids, one or two were infants, and one died around age 12 or so, if my memory is accurate and here it’s a little fuzzy, yes, it is. Was a shock to see Mrs. Walton had died in childbirth. For one child was born the day the mother perished, and in turn passed soon afterwards. Learned from someone in the know somewhere Samuel Walton eventually remarried and more kids. Life was like this back then worldwide. Our greater human history had many wonderful periods of peace and prosperity, but most of them were short in duration and regional in expanse. Wars, famines, floods, droughts, pests, disease epidemics and pandemics, fires, murders, domestic violence, economic and socio-political collapse, torture, infections, accidents, wild animals, tyranny and despotism, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, earthquakes, ice ages, heat waves, toxic pollution, mass extinctions, the list goes on and on…and on. And yet we persist. And endure. Rise back up somehow somewhere and reach for the stars. Life goes on for the living even after so many have perished.
The Afterlife remains a mystery, even for those who have managed to go there and return. We know a lot about this Afterlife, it’s more complex and multitiered than once imagined, The Afterlife is deeply connected to the enigma of consciousness and the psychic-paranormal. Whole religions have grown up around the meanings we give to so many such experiences and the rituals we humans made up. Yet we cannot prove any of it. Not yet, anyway. I don’t think RIP or Rest in Peace is the best send off, do you? Wouldn’t you want to do more than spend all Eternity in infinite stillness of rest? So go forth, Ada, as you journey onwards into the Great Unknown, to explore and live it up and, from what we think may occur, contribute to the service of helping other souls. You are loved. Your life however brief in our time and place is treasured. Already you leave behind the gift of your love and all the precious memories become legacy.
William Dudley Bass
Monday 30 June 2025
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
Earth
Resources:
Brinson Ivey, Gail. “Cousin Chart: Family Relationships Explained,” Genealogy: Brinson, Terrell, Shumaker, and May families, September 2022. https://www.genealogy.gailbrinsonivey.com/cousin-chart-family-relationships-explained/.
“Obituary: Ada Jane Harvin,” Dignity Memorial, Murfreesboro, TN. https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/murfreesboro-tn/ada-harvin-12436379.
Copyright © 2025 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. The images above from the obituary are public and belong to the parents. Thank you.