Things I know about Theresa
She was born during a hot month. When the doctor was in the bedroom working on the delivery, he had a fan aimed to blow directly on himself. This meant that when the baby emerged, the first thing she felt was that blast of cold air from the fan. From the way Papa talked about it to me, I felt that he blamed that doctor for the fact that Theresa only lived a few days and that her cause of death was listed as Pneumonia.
I don't know if Marcel and Bernie attended the funeral, but one Sunday afternoon when the family was going to visit the gravesite Bernie ran over and picked up his little sand shovel. When Papa asked him why he wanted to bring that Bernie answered "To dig her up."
Theresa is buried in Holy Cross cemetery on Dix across from Patton Park. I think I only learned about that after Monica's baby Pamela died (February, 1960, I think) and was buried there also. After Pamela died, Papa bought a headstone for Theresa's grave.
After we moved into the Navy house, I went over to office of Holy Cross to locate the two gravesites. I learned then that there was another Beauregard baby buried there. One of Eldege's babies that had been born while the Eldege Beauregard family lived across Navy from our house. You may all remember that John Robert, Laurent, and Marc were all born in and had citizenship in the US of A.
This other Beauregard child (I don't remember a name) had malnutrition listed as the cause of death. I confronted Mama with this, thinking that if food were a problem surely they would have seen that the kids were fed. Mama explained that when a baby can't hold his food down, malnutrition is what they die from. I felt very stupid.
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4 comments:
I didn't realize that Woodmere cemetary had a real name.
Woodmere cemetary is on the corner of Woodmere and Vernor and was (as we always thought of it) the public school cemetary. Holy Cross is the Catholic cemetary on Dix on the other side of Patton.
I don't remember Holy Cross either. I seem to remember looking for Theresa and Pamela's grave but I always assumed we were in Woodmere Cemetery. We never went over to the Dix side of Patton Park that just seemed too far away.
Eldege did not live across the street from us on Navy Street. We moved there in 1935, a number of years after Eldege and Yevone had left Detroit. We lived on Campbell Street before that, this was the house that Mamma used as a boarding house. Eldege lived about two blocks away from us. I know because I took Yevone there one day when she wanted to see what the place looked liked after so many years. That house was still there and was dismal and in disarray. There were no curtins in the window and we could see a bare bulb hanging down from an electric cord. She said she was glad to have seen it. Some of their boys were born here because they had U. S. citizenship. Laurent for sure was born here because I shared a crib with him as a baby.
This is the first I heard that Teresa had a headstone, or that Eldege had a baby there.
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