My Little sister

I have to admit I've been having fun writing this "blog", but today, I'm going to be a little more serious. Today, I'm going to write about my "little sister" Donna.

Donna was not really my little sister as she was almost 5 years older then me. The reason I call her my little sister is because she was just a wisp of a person. She was about 4' 11" tall and weighed in a whopping 90 lbs. (I have a big toe that weighs that much). Being the middle of three children is a hard position to be in, especially if the "baby" is the only boy in the family. To that end, Donna went through husbands on a regular bases. She was married 3 times, which caused great strife with my father, mainly because he liked both her first and second husbands.

Shortly after we returned to Santa Paula, after I was discharged, first my parents and then Doris and her family, moved to Southern Utah. Betty and I purchased a home in Santa Paula and the only relatives we had close by, were Betty's sisters, her mother and my sister Donna, who lived in Quartz Hill.

After we had lived in Santa Paula for about 4 years, I was transferred to Bakersfield. The movers were going to pack our house on Tuesday and Wednesday, but the Saturday prior to that, Donna stopped by to visit. Before she left, I told her to have the coffee on Monday morning because I had a service call in China Lake and I would stop and have coffee with her on the way. Well, we never had coffee together. When I arrived at her house, Cinda, my niece, came running out telling me she couldn't find her mother. When we searched the house, we found Donna about 3/4 under her bed. I called 911 but I knew she was not alive. During the night she had a brain aneurysm give way. She was just 19 days from her 40th birthday.

I have to tell you, it was the beginning of a difficult week. As I stated before, Donna had been married three times, and was separated from her 3rd husband when she died. In addition, she was estranged from my parents. So, it was up to me to start making arrangements, get Cinda's father from Missouri to come for Cinda, inform my parents, and move. I will say her husband was helpful with the arrangements, so eliminated some stress. Betty was also a great comfort and help, but with Amy being only 6 months old, she had her hands full also. I made it through the week, however, I don't ever want to go through that again.

This picture of Donna was used at her memorial.

It is a great picture of her and we had it "antiqued".



This picture was taken at our house in Santa Paula the Saturday before she died .

What I'm going to relate now is something very few people have heard. Shortly after moving to Bakersfield, Daryl and I got involved in Boy Scouts. A little over a year after Donna died we were on a camping trip with the Scouts in the foothills of the Sierras. By this time I was the Scoutmaster, so anything that anyone needed, they would come to me. Well, I was sound asleep when I felt someone "tugging" on my foot through my sleeping bag. Thinking it was one of the boys, I instantly came awake and was I startled, to say the least. Why? Because standing at the foot of my sleeping bag was my sister Donna. She just looked at me, shook her head in a positive way and said everything is o.k. with her and my Dad. She then just disappeared. I, of course thought I had dreamed it, but later that summer my Dad and I were in the pool cooling off when I related the story to him. He asked me the time-frame of the incident and when I told him, he said it wasn't a dream as Donna had visited him at that time also.

You can take the above story however you want, but I know Donna wanted me to know about her reconciliation with my Dad.