Mother Hospitalized

On July 18th, 1965 was an inbetween Sunday at our Turkey Farm in Missouri. The boys had been invited somewhere with the young folks , at one place for dinner and another place in the evening. Along in the afternoon my mother started having severe stomach pains where she'd groan out loud. In retrospect, mother had not been well all summer but we weren't alarmed or at least I can't remember that I was. Anyway that afternoon Dad sent us out with a white bed sheet to wave in the air out by the buggy shop in hopes the boys would see it as they passed on the road half a mile away. Sure enough, Rudy and Truman saw it and leaving the lineof buggies they came home . I don't remember clearly but I think Dad sent Rudy to call the Doctor , Dr. Hull, and he came to the house , examined mother and said he'd take her to the hospital as she was seriously ill. We children, all ten of us from 18 yr old Rudy to 3 yr old Mary stood in a row and shook mother's hand as she told us good-bye and went with Dad and the doctor. Nine days later she died in the hospital. They did exploratory surgery and found her stomach so full of cancer that they just closed her up and said there was no hope of a cure.
The last time I saw her alive she was delirious and kept saying,"Where are the girls? I want to see the girls."
Dad would line us along the bedside and tell us to touch her hand, then he'd tell her the girls were all here but she didn't recognize us.
I prayed for my mother to be healed, surely God would answer my desperate prayers.And when my mother died I concluded that my prayers were useless and quit praying, but only for a little while because as sure as I didn't pray at night before I went to sleep I would have terrible nightmares. So I started praying again that God would send an angel to watch over me while I slept and it always worked.
Now in January of that year my best friend Mary's mother had died very suddenly of a blood clot in her head, if I got it r ight and my mother died in July , then in December my friend Barbara's mother died at childbirth. So there in that little church of possibly 20 families there were three families with each 10 children who were motherless. Thirty motherless children in one church. Now that was a wake up call and material for many an Amish sermon.