Week 35: Unforgettable

Things have been difficult here as we are dealing with not just the pandemic but major wildfires on the west coast from Montana west through Washington, south through Oregon and California.  Air quality in Portland Oregon has been in the hazardous level while here in La Conner we are just at "Unhealthy."  Tomorrow it is predicted to be Unhealthy for Vulnerable Populations.  I guess that's progress, but it's small consolation for those who have lost all of their possessions or worse, those who have lost their lives.  Our mantra is always:  things can be replaced but people cannot.

I had actually picked a person to focus on for "Unforgettable" when all of this chaos started (the smoke has been a problem here).  My grandmother's younger sister, Myrtle McDuff Mayhew, died very young.  I remember my grandmother, Grace McDuff Belknap, mentioning in passing that Clarence Mayhew, Myrtle's widower. had come to see her at some point.  This was the only time I remember my grandmother saying anything about Clarence and Myrtle but  apparently something about how she said it impressed me because I am still thinking about that conversation more than 50 years later.  My mother told me that Myrtle had died as the result of an overdose of some medication and that the doctor had to be brought in to certify that it had been an accident as opposed to suicide.  And that was pretty much all I knew of Myrtle:  she was childless and she left a grieving widower.

But, thanks to Ancestry.com's untiring accumulation of documents from the past, I've learned a little bit more about Myrtle and Clarence.  They must have married very young, though that was not unusual in the early 20th century.  In any case, it seems that they had a daughter, Dorothy Helen who was born and died on November 26th, 1916.  The death certificate says that her death was due to a valve in her heart that did not close (I would like to know how they determined that).  Myrtle was 19 and Clarence was 20.  The death of a child is a devastating event at any time in a parent's life, but particularly difficult to deal with when you are so young.  Myrtle was  far away from her family:  Dorothy was born and died in Meridian, Idaho while all of Myrtle's family was in Washington state. 

Myrtle died on February 27, 1919, back in Washington state, just 22 years of age.   I should be able to get a copy of her death certificate from the Bureau of Vital Statistics but I don't have much hope that it will clarify the facts of her death.  I suspect that no matter what the putative cause, the real cause of her death was her own broken heart.