My mom is the tallest one in the picture. She towers over her little nephews and nieces though she can’t be much more than ten years old. She’s wearing a flowered dress with a large floppy collar. Her hair is dark and cropped short, with thick bangs covering her forehead. Standing around her, squinting at the camera are the other children, five of them, and they are all smiling except for the smallest one, front and center, crying his eyes out. It has clearly been a long day at Dry Gulch and I bet the poor guy missed out on his nap. 

I was given this picture several years ago by my cousin Gerrie Griffin who will be 94 this year. In the picture, Gerrie is standing to the left of my mother, Lois Griffin. She and the other two little girls are each wearing white dresses so I'd wager the photo was taken after church services on a Sunday. To the right of my mother is a boy in overalls who looks to be about six years old. His name is Billie Joe Iorg.

When I first read his name on the back of the photo, I was confused because I thought Billie Joe was a girl's name. I have another cousin from Utah, a girl cousin, whose name is Bobbie Kaye, so when I read the name Billie Joe, I just assumed it was a girl. I felt a little sorry for the boy. Did people tease him? Did he wish he had a different name? I looked at him again and wondered, "What kind of person are you? Can you fend for yourself?" My interest was piqued.

So I did what anyone with a FamilySearch account and an ounce of genealogical nerdiness would do: I looked him up online. As it turns out we are related but not as close as I had thought. We are 12th cousins. Translated that means one would actually have to travel 13 generations back in time to mid-16th century England to find our common grandparents.  But since his sister was Gerrie's mom and Gerrie's dad was my mom's brother, little Billie Joe Iorg and I suddenly became a lot closer though not by blood.

When I located Billie Joe Iorg's entry on FamilySearch I learned three things about him in quick succession. The first thing I learned was that he was the youngest of 11 children. It was not uncommon at that time for married women of child-bearing age to give birth every 2 years. His mother was married just 7 days after her 16th birthday and had her first child 7 months later. The second thing I learned was that his name really was Billie Joe. There is a note that his birth name may have been Billie Jo (that is, Joe without the e) though there is no birth record attached to confirm or disprove. The third thing I learned is that little Billie Joe Iorg died just one year after this picture was taken. 

My heart stopped.  

What? That can’t be right. There must be a mistake. 

I look back at the photo as if it might yield up some clue. He is so alive in the picture. So healthy and playful and vibrant. How is that possible?  But there it is - written in black and white: his full name, followed by a date, a dash and another date: “Billie Joe Iorg 1930-1937.” What happened to you little boy?

I search the faces of each of the children, scanning for anything that would cue me in as to why this little boy never got to grow up and have children of his own. I look into my mother’s face and ask: What can you tell me about little Billie Joe? Anything at all. Was he a picky eater? Did he like being tickled? 

I glance over at his picture again and note that there is an air of tranquility about him, a sense of knowing he belongs and that he is loved. His head is cocked to one side, his hand on his hip is relaxed and though he is biting his lower lip, he is also smiling. He's a team player, I conclude, a good sport. He would have enjoyed being teased. He would have liked his name.

Death is a curious thing. If we look at it too closely it will drive us mad. If we ignore it, it takes us by surprise and can wreak havoc. We find ourselves navigating our relationship with death like a balancing act. It's as though we don't want to look at death directly because we don't want to draw attention to ourselves, but we also know we should be informed and prepared.

I want to ask my mom about Billie Joe Iorg. Did she miss him? Did she think about him a lot? I want to know how his death affected her. 

My mother grew up in Roosevelt, Utah. She was the 11th of 13 children. Only six of them, including Gerrie's father, survived to adulthood. When I used to ask my mother about her early childhood she'd say, “There isn’t much to tell: we lived in the middle of nowhere and we were dirt poor.” 

They lived in a one-room, log cabin on the outskirts of town. They were sheep farmers. They rode horses. They had a large vegetable garden, food was simple and sometimes her mom would make them clothing out of flour sacks.  She recalls being in town one day, waiting in a buggy with her mother while her father went into the bank. When he emerged, he said dryly, “There is nothing left.” The stock market crash of 1929 wiped them out. Her mother went to work as a cook at an Indian school and sent my mom to live with her older sisters.

What I hadn’t realized about that day in town at the bank, was that her mother, Rose, had just given birth to a child a couple weeks earlier on October 14. This would have been their last child, my mother’s youngest sibling, child number 13, a son, Mark Griffin. On his death certificate it says the cause of death was, “prematurity and inanition.” He died on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, the same day the market crashed. 

I don't imagine anyone ever gets over the pain of losing a child. There is no vaccine for grief, no immunity from sorrow, no escaping untimely losses. They happen to everyone. Heartbreak, combined with the anxiety of losing one's livelihood, and still having mouths to feed would have been enough to send anyone into the depths of despair. 

Yet, somehow, despite the poverty, the challenges and the losses, things do seem to gradually work out for my mother. Perhaps it was her own mother’s determination to see that at least one of her children get a good education or my mother's own resolve to escape from poverty that enabled her to live up to the nickname that her friends bestowed upon her: "Lucky." She learns to play the violin, she attends a private Presbyterian High School, and graduates from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and a minor in English.  She moves up to Ogden, Utah where she enrolls in a training course to become a Medical Technician. While there, she meets a brilliant young scientist who was in a PhD program at UC Berkeley in California. He was her ticket out of Utah. She claims to have "swept him off his feet" and they lived happily ever after.

If only things were that simple. 

My earliest memory seeing my mother crumble with grief was when she got a phone call from my older sister. I was getting dressed for school and my father was also preparing for work. She was in the kitchen making breakfast when the phone rang. I hear her answer the phone and then seconds later she is screaming, "No! No! No!" It's a sound I've never heard from my mother before. It's a deafening roar which is both instantaneous and interminable. It shakes the very foundation of my existence.  "Dawn is dead," she cries, "Dawn is dead!" The next thing I know we are entering my sister's house. The baby is gone, taken presumably by the paramedics to do an autopsy. I sit alone in my niece’s room. Her crib is empty. 

The next time my mother collapses is when she loses me. I didn’t die, of course, but in a way it was a loss even more painful than death because I was willingly disowning her. I was turning my back on everything she had worked so hard to provide for me. How could I so callously walk away from all the opportunities that were placed in front of me, opportunities that were never offered to her growing up during the depression in rural Utah? It was completely unfathomable. It was a very dark time. 

There are people in this world who try to strike a deal with the grim reaper and Utah Mormons are no exception. I don’t think little Billie Joe’s family were Mormon, but my mom’s family was. They had arrived in Utah with Brigham Young and the earliest pioneers in the mid-1800s to settle the barren Salt Lake Valley.  Mormon theology teaches that life does not end with death and that families can be together forever. Marriages performed in the holiest of all places, temples, are looked upon as solemn covenants which draw upon heavenly powers to seal the couple and their posterity together for time and all eternity. Life does not end at death. Families are eternal. Loved ones will be reunited. These are certainly comforting thoughts: “This isn’t goodbye, it’s just til we meet again.”

But my mom refused to believe that there was only one way to heaven and only one way to be fed spiritually. For her, living life meant finding beauty in her surroundings and in nurturing relationships with people. She particularly loved literature and the arts: classical music, ballet, and live theater performances became a regular part of her weekly routine and she rarely went alone.  

Returning to the photograph, I take a closer look. I'm still searching for answers. I decide to try and make sense of what the children are standing in front of. It appears to be a massive wall of awkwardly stacked, sun-bleached, tree trunks. These are not the perfectly cylindrical tree trunks that are used to build log cabins. Rather these are ugly misshapen forms, like the twisted remains of a sunken pirate ship, created from some violent deluge and left to dry under a merciless sun. They are still and silent but their very existence bears witness to forces of nature that are relentless and unstoppable. All we can do is stand in their wake and marvel. 

My mother once told me that if none of the people she cared about were going to be in heaven then she didn’t want to be there either. She valued relationships over religiosity, sincerity over piety, service over sanctimony. Part of accepting our mortal existence is accepting the inevitable: we're born, we live, we die. We have no control really over those two dates that will eventually define our life span, but the dash in between those dates, that's our time and my mother understood that. That small line represents our turn on this big green planet when we can run and play, laugh and cry, mourn and rejoice. That's what we have control over. My mother would make her own heaven and if that didn't work out, then she’d be just fine with the memories of her dash of heaven on earth, memories of a life well-lived with people she loved, cherished and yes, perhaps even teased.

Author's note: I initially wrote this story in February 2021 when my mom's niece Gerrie was 90.