Monday, November 14, 2011

They Lived Together, and Died Together

Because when you spend 48 years of your life together, you don't want to be parted by death.

Allan DeLaine told "Rhoe," when he visited her in the hospital a few weeks ago, that "Rabbit" - her husband - wouldn't last long in this world without her. After 48 years, 11 months of marriage, the couple had become as one, not only to all the people who knew them in their Clayton community, but to each other.

Rhoe didn't dispute him.

"She agreed with me. She said 'I know,' " DeLaine told me last week in the parking lot of Johnston Piney Grove Missionary Baptist Church. "I just knew he wasn't going to be able to make it without her. I had no idea he would go as quickly after her as he did."

A few feet from where we stood talking, two long, shiny black hearses were warming their engines at the head of a procession, preparing to take Cynthia Rhoenna Gardner Sanders and Augustus Cromwell Sanders to the cemetery where, side by side, they'd spend eternity - or at least until that great gettin' up mornin' that Mahalia Jackson sang about.


Sometimes it seems like later generations have lost that devotion and sense of commitment that the Sanders obviously had for each other. Great story, click the link to read the rest.

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