STERKWORKS | Ex-Mormon Lesbian Surviving Utah

I just realized it is Memorial Day this month, and it brought back a flood of great memories. I love memorial day.

My mother’s father is buried in Provo. His family immigrated from Italy in the early 1900s. He was cool. When I was a child, he would wash our feet and let the grandkids stomp the grapes he had grown so he could make his homemade wine. Before I knew him, he did other amazing things. Loosened the floorboards of an outhouse to get revenge on coworkers, who would end up in a pile of neck high shit. When the Mormons bugged him to start coming to church, he did once, mounted on a horse which he rode into the chapel up the front, then turned around and left. When he was a sheepherder, he discovered other men were drinking from his bottle of booze, so he took a half filled bottle and peed into it. It got swiped that night as usual, but it was the last time. He owned a cane made out of a petrified horse penis. I love this guy. Grandpa died when I was ten. And we drove from Las Vegas for the funeral. But the highlight of the trip came before the funeral. It was the ritual of digging up grandpa’s arm.

As a young man, my grandfather worked in a stone quarry and was in a pit loading huge stones onto a conveyor belt. His glove got caught on the belt and it started pulling him up to the machine that crushed the stone. He couldn’t get himself free, so rather than getting sucked in to the crushing machine, he grabbed onto a pole with his free arm, and held on tight enough that the conveyor belt pulled off his arm attached to it at the elbow.

Luckily, some men saw him, and those who didn’t faint saved him from bleeding to death. His one request was that they retrieve his arm. He had it sent to the mortuary and had it embalmed and sealed in a small metal box. Then he buried it in his back yard.

Every time he and my grandmother would move, they would dig up the arm, rebury it at the new house and have a huge party. My grandmother accused him of wanting to move so much just so he could have his arm burying parties. Eventually they settled in one house which was the one all of the grandkids grew up knowing and enjoying.

So the day before grandpa’s funeral, the family gathered and opened up a whole bunch of his homemade wine. My mother, who has never even uttered a swear word in her entire Mormon life, even had a sip. Her brothers remembered the markings on the house, made the appropriate paces, removed since built garden structures, and dug up grandpa’s arm. Right where they had helped him bury it when they moved into that house as kids.

And grandpa’s arm, which he could still feel for the entire 40 years after he no longer had it attached to his body, was placed with his body in his casket and buried with him the next day. And although I was only ten, I felt privileged to have known this man, helped him make wine, and been his little “Annie Catchatori.”

Filed under: History, Family