10 for 10 Gratitude Challenge Number 4

Ok, I got a little behind.  I knew this would happen.  Don’t worry, I’ll compensate.

Write 10 deceased people you are grateful for.

1. Great Great Great Grandma Emma.  In my family we generally refer to her as “the woman with the awful life” but in all seriousness she was a pretty incredible lady.  She joined the LDS church in England with her family, then they traveled across the ocean, then across the country with the pioneers to Salt Lake City.  Then when she was a newlywed her parents and siblings decided to go back to Illinois to be with the reorganized LDS church.  Later her husband and two of her children died within the space of about 2 years.  She was a trooper.
2. Great Grandma Venice.  She also had some difficult parts of her life and was also a trooper.  She lived in a tiny sheep camp during the winter with her young children.
3. Great Grandma Vesta.  She went to the same collage as me and was the captain of the freshman girls basketball team.  That seems pretty progressive for the late 1920’s, and I admire that.
4. My cousin Lydia.  She died when she was six after a somewhat routine heart surgery didn’t go quite as planned.  I was only two at the time, so I only have one very fleeting memory of her, but I’m told we were great friends.  I’m grateful I’ll have the opportunity to get to know her later.
5. Joseph B. Wirthlin.  All the apostles are great, but there was one particular talk he gave that had a lasting impact on me—not necessarily because of what he said, but how he said it.  My LDS friends might remember it as the talk where Elder Nelson stood by him to support him as he spoke.
6. C. S. Lewis.  I don’t know too much about his personal life (there’s got to be some good biographies out there, so if you know of a good one let me know), but he wrote some incredible things.
7. Mozart.  Or Tchaikovsky.  Or Vivaldi.  Or Bach.  Or Debussy.  Or Chopin.  I really can’t narrow it down.  The classics are great.
8. The Founding Fathers.  None of them were perfect, of course, but I’m grateful for their contribution to the creation of the United States.
9. Lewis and Clark.  Kind of a random one, but I just listened to a podcast on them and they were pretty cool.  They were a pretty important part of the settlement of the West.  Which is a big deal when you live in the West.
10. Cemeteries.  Ok, this is a lot of deceased people and very general, but you can learn a lot from headstones.