Mrs. A's Mom has passed away ...

We got the news mid-morning on Sunday.  She'd had an event that required ICU care last week, and Carroll  flew back for a few days and so had an opportunity to spend some quality time with her Mom toward the end.  Mom was just finishing a long, difficult recovery and rehab from a stroke a few years back and it was likely a complication of the recovery that took her from us. She was 86.

Anna Louise Hale LaPrade was born on Christmas Eve in 1924 in Henlawson, Logan County, West Virginia, one of six children.  Her Mother died when Anna was nine and she and her brothers and sisters were raised by their Father.  Always driven, Anna went first to Business School and then to Nursing School in Logan, where she met her future husband, Lester LaPrade.  She worked as an RN until 1984, when she retired in Richmond VA. She's acknowledged by her siblings as the most and best educated of the family.

Anna is survived by her children, Carroll and Steve, and members of the Hale and LaPrade families, including a step-son from her husband's previous marriage, Lester LaPrade Jr.  Steve is one of my closest friends and I consider Lester to be my personal spiritual advisor (he's an ordained minister).

I first met Mom in 1985, when Carroll and I began dating.  She kept a carefully arched eye on me, knowing that both Carroll and I had been married previously and that I would "by-God-do-right-by-her-daughter-or-suffer-the-consequences."  I like to think I didn't disappoint her.

Mom never minced words.  She said exactly what she thought -- she was "politically incorrect" way before it was cool to be that way.  And she was a great cook. Maybe the best home cook I've ever met; I learned much from her.

Carroll visited Richmond and her Mom more than me in the past few years and that will always be a big regret for me.  But Mom often called here and we'd talk and Carroll always called her at 12N every Sunday and Mom always told Carroll to let me know that "she loved me a bushel and a peck."  I guess you have to be of a certain age to understand that reference.

Anna Louise Hale LaPrade was, in the words of the WV and VA churches she attended, a "righteous woman."

We miss her very much.  See ya soon, Mom.