Charles William O’Brien, age 80, passed from this life to the next on November 15, 2023, though I didn’t hear of it until this week. Charles is my dad’s cousin, the son of my grandma’s sister, Myrtle, and for as long as I can remember, he has been the owner of the “home place” of our family in West Virginia. A long haul truck driver and veteran of the Vietnam War, Charlie wasn’t a man of many words, but he did love the land and home of our ancestors and along with his brother, Rodney, who lives down the lane, has cared for that piece of our history.
I was eleven years old when my dad and grandma took me to visit her family in West Virginia. It was dark as we drove up the winding road from the Greenbrier River to Aunt Myrtle’s house that sat in the bend of the road that led to the “home place”.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I saw the land and the hollow where my family had lived for generations. It was the home where my great great grandparents raised their only child, Charles. It was the home where he brought his new bride, Gracie, and where their oldest child, my grandma and her eight siblings were born and raised. I recall standing in front of it while my grandma and her sisters laughed about how often my grandma, a tomboy, used the towering tree growing next to their second story bedroom window to descend to the yard below. I could see them in my mind as they described the long walk up to Aunt Willie’s house or to the crest of the ridge to work for Aunt Sally. The hollow where Myrtle and her sons lived was like a beacon of my family pulling me in and each time I crossed the Greenbrier River and turned right on River Road, I had the feeling that though I had never lived there, I was home.
Grandma died my freshman year of college and Myrtle passed away ten days before I got married, but the home still beckoned and when I went, it still looked the same thanks to his meticulous care. With the generation before gone, Charles started to share stories of helping with the chores, of how many biscuits Grandpa Patton could eat for breakfast and the full pie he would eat for Sunday dessert. He told me about the wind storm that finally brought the aging barn down and the story of Grandpa Patton’s closest cousin, Ira, who before Grandpa and Grandma Patton were married, proposed to Grandma Gracie and was never quite forgiven.
I was not a big piece of Charles life, but he played a vital part in mine. In so many ways, he was a link to the generations that went before me attaching me to them and helping our past to live. “Each of us is a link in the chain of our generations. You, each of you, are a link to the past and a link to generations yet to come….” (Elder David A. Bednar, Twitter, October 28, 2019)