If you want to find Billie Noland on a Thursday morning, the best place to look is Friendship Cemetery. Such has been the case for 29 years.
That’s how long it’s been since her son, Gil, died in a car crash on an icy road in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he was working his way through college.
George Gilliam “Gil” Gerhart was a month shy of his 21st birthday, the only son of Billie and George Gerhart.
“That is the most traumatic thing that can happen to a person,” the mother says.
How does a parent deal with that kind of grief?
Each in his or her own way.
Billie, 72, does it with once-a-week meditations at her son’s grave.
Some days she sits on her prayer bench; other days she gets down on her knees. Some days she can’t get out of the car.
Billie was 13th of 14 children of W.A. and Thelma Gentry. Her father owned the phone companies in Crawford and Artesia. She and all of her siblings pulled duty as switchboard operators. She likens her Crawford childhood to Mayberry.
When the church doors opened on Sunday, the Gentry children were there. (Mom and dad stayed home to work the switchboard.)
Through the challenges of marriage, parenting and divorce, Billie’s Christian faith sustained her.
After Gil’s death, Billie and God had a parting of the ways, you could say.
“I got angry with God,” she said.
Then one day she had an epiphany.
“I was down on my knees crying, saying some unkind things to God, and then I realized he had given his only son, too.
“He’s not healed my broken heart, but he’s smoothed the jagged edges,” she said.
Now that they are on speaking terms again, Billie sometimes asks God for a sign he’s heard her prayers.
“A bird will land on the tombstone, a butterfly will fly by or a leaf will fall from a tree.”
And for that particular visit, this is affirmation enough for one grieving mother.
Some days she walks the cemetery looking at tombstones. She finds solace in the natural beauty of the place. There are familiar names, people she once knew and odd epitaphs carved in stone. She likes one found on a grave at the south end of the cemetery near the Confederate memorial. The one on the tombstone of T.B. Watson who died March 1, 1928:
Remember me as you pass by;
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you shall be
Prepare yourself to follow me.
On a recent Thursday I met Billie down at Friendship. The day was warm and sunny. We talked, then went for a walk. She had something she wanted to show me, something she had never seen in her 29 years of visits. Something she found one morning while following deer tracks.
We walked to a corner of the cemetery back by the river, and there by a recently filled grave was a blue Coleman sleeping bag and an overturned folding chair. The sleeping bag had been unzipped and spread before a freshly filled grave site. When Billie first happened upon the sight, she cried.
“I think they want to be close to their loved one,” she said. “This is the epitome of grief, lying on the ground.”
Who could better understand.
“Grief is something one cannot go around; one must go through it,” she says. “I believe each of us has the right to grieve in our own way, and that we each grieve differently. Some of us grieve for years, while others hide their grief.”
After our walk we ended back at Gil’s grave.
“I will be buried here, next to Gil,” Billie says.
She says her two daughters helped her with the inscription on her son’s tombstone:
To the world, he was but one.
To us, he was the world.
As I get ready to go, Billie and I stood there among the live oaks. Rows of stone markers stretch in every direction, each a memorial to a life lived.
“Look at all of these tombstones,” she says. “Can you imagine how much heartbreak, how many tears have been shed here?
“As long as there is a memory, the person will never die.”
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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