Walter was a big man with thick-lidden eyes. (When a writer uses that expression to describe a character, Uncle Walter's face immediately flashes before me.) With his soft, kind voice, he was a "gentle Ben" type of man.
Walter worked on the ore boats that traverse the Great Lakes, where he would sign on for a tour of duty and be gone for months at a time. What made him the happiest was his pleasure at finding something special at an auction or garage sale. He would stop at the farm and show Mother and Dad what he had found, leaning against his truck, reliving the purchase with them.
Poor health plagued him, probably because of his weight; he sank into depression, became cranky and impossible to live with, so his last days were spent in a nursing home. Mother or Aunt Rose would visit him, but otherwise he was alone. When he died he was buried in the Stonington Cemetery, a small, lovely place far down on the Stonington Peninsula, where he had been born and grew to manhood.
I heard that on his gravestone were the words, "LIFE'S NOT FAIR." Mother said she thought that was on his gravestone, although she couldn't be sure. Walter must have picked it out himself before he died.
Was this his testimony to the world--this tragic epitaph? I purposed to go and see for myself the next time I was home.
My next visit my sister Lolly, Mother and I, set out on a Sunday afternoon for the cemetery. The cemetery is a twenty or so mile trip down the peninsula, and as we drove we reminisced about who had lived here and there, and where they were now--a real, old-fashioned Sunday drive. The cemetery road came up on our right and soon we were walking among the graves of old friends and family. I passed Jim Johnson's stone. He was a school classmate who had died in a car accident on the Stonington road when he was 16 years old. I had forgotten him. Rest in peace, Jimmy.
Then I saw the stone, WALTER C. ERICKSEN 1928 - 1992, and sure enough it said, "LIFE'S NOT FAIR."
Those words had laid heavy on my heart since I first heard them. Life certainly is not fair, but to leave them as your last words to the world was such a sadness to my soul. But there was a second line on the stone which gave flight to my soul. I shouted to Lolly and Mother and we stood before the stone and read:
LIFE'S NOT FAIR
BUT GOD IS GOOD
That last line made all the difference. Why had no one remembered the last line! The summation of Walter's life was totally changed by that line. To have God, and account that He is good and that He is the measure against all the world can throw at us, is indeed a blessed place for our soul to abide. Walter had a hope and a testimony of God's goodness.
We left that cemetery with our souls in communion with Walter; life might not fair, but praise His name, God is good!
"The LORD is good unto them that wait for Him, to the soul that seeketh Him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD."
(Lamentations 3:25,26)
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