So now the story’s told of a bit of the life of the step-mother of Will and Katie Stevens. As if they were close enough to be blood relatives, Theresa Blaising Stevens died in a Chicago hospital of the very same thing that had claimed her step-son Will a year prior: coronary thrombosis.
Theresa’s last journey started in Chicago, where she passed away at St. Bernard’s hospital, and was completed four days later when she was laid to rest next to her husband, John Kelly Stevens, in the mausoleum at the Catholic Cemetery in Fort Wayne on July 28, 1947. That simple trip reunited her with her husband, but separated her by 160 miles from the one she loved as her own son.
Ironically, while she was separated by the miles from the one child she raised, the very one who became so estranged from her—her step-daughter Catherine Louise—was buried not far from Theresa in the exact same cemetery, alongside her husband, Frederick J. Stahl. She died seven days shy of seven years after Theresa’s passing.
Whether Catherine ever took the opportunity to resolve the hard feelings that separated her from the rest of the Stevens family, I’ll never know. That rift may have remained frozen in time, an invisible yet tangible barrier displacing what could have been, had the opportunity been taken when it was afforded them.
I saw a TV show on PBS while being laid up about cemeteries - and memorials and how each of the stones bearing a name - had a story behind it.
ReplyDeleteAnd here you are with this post - showing some names and dates - and telling what is known of their story.
The TV show concluded - while the cemetery (death) was an "equaliser" in that everyone was the now the "same," that is, dead - their stories are all interesting and they - if there is anything left of them beyond the remnents left in the living (memories), they would welcome being visited and remembered.