My father died on Saturday, April 8. He lived 97 years. Until struck with COVID, he had never had to stay in a hospital. In the last three months, he mustered all his strength to overcome the virus’ results: internal bleeding, then post-COVID pneumonia, then the side-effects of medication, and finally one more case of pneumonia. I curse the disease and all it does. He passed on peacefully last night after we — his entire family, the five of us — had the blessing of spending his last day with him, affirming our love.
I am writing this only for myself. I’m not writing it for him; he outlived everyone he knew. Neither am I writing it for you; I don’t expect you to read this, for you did not know him. I find such memorials for loved ones, including pets, in social media understandable but difficult, for I never know how to react. I do not expect you to. I simply want to memorialize my father, to leave a trace of his life connected with mine here. As an old newspaperman, I understand the value of the obituary more than the grave.
Darrell V. Jarvis was born in the tiny house on his grandfather’s rocky, dirt-poor farm up the holler behind the Methodist church in Weston, West Virginia. His parents were not much educated, Buck finishing the seventh grade, Vera not a lot more. They worked hard and moved often, following drilling crews to gas fields in West Virginia, Kentucky…
