Or, more likely, it’s like a companion of mine told me about his experience with dengue fever: first you feel so bad you’re afraid you’re going to die; then you feel worse and you’re afraid you’re not going to die.

I think it was common in the past not to hold a funeral but just to have a brief graveside service when someone died, if he died at a time people couldn’t travel, or were swamped with work, or for other reasons. Then at a more convenient time, a church service would be held where a true funeral sermon was preached, perhaps in honor of one or perhaps in honor of many who had died in the past months. When my 2nd gr-grandmother died on the first day out of Winter Quarters, for instance, and the diary of a fellow traveler records that “her funeral sermon was left to be preached in the Valley.” And wasn’t the King Follett Sermon a funeral sermon preached well after King Follett had died?

It was Elder H’s chill day

?

we passed down through Renfro Prairie

Renfro? As in Mrs. Renfro’s? Since we are talking about Texas here, it could be named after the same family.

I wrote a letter to my sister Josephine

Wow. Elder Jones comes from a very large family. Josephine would be his half-sister, Josephine Miller Jones, who married David Thomas Clark four months later. Perhaps she had written with the news of her engagement.

We did not fail to get the gospel before them.

Good for Elder Jones and Elder Hewart.

He had been dead 5 months.

I hope they didn’t keep the body the entire time!

I wonder if this was a case of “they’re always out to get us” assumptions that Elder Jones wrote out of habit but really didn’t believe, deep down. In any case, whatever the cause of the fire, the young man lost.

The casual reaction to the fire in Aug 05 kind of surprises me.