In Memoriam.

Died in Atlanta, 146 Luckie street, at 4;40 P. M., on Thursday last, the 27th ult., Mrs. Linda Myra Defoor, the mother of the editor of the Free Press, aged 77 years, 10 months and 11 days.

The deceased had been a great sufferer for many years which she had borne with great fortitude and Christian resignation.  For seven weeks we remained almost constantly by her bedside, watching her life passing away in great suffering.  Her children and her neighbors and friends did all that could be done to smooth her dying pillow and at last, to support her as she slowly stepped into the cold waters of death and passed over to the land of rest, the reward of a life of piety.  Her only thoughts were for her children, the dead as well as the living, whom she constantly called for and whom she could not bear to be absent.  All of them yet living, save one daughter, now in Mississippi, were around her bedside to witness the departure of a spirit that had been made holy by suffering and sorrow.

It is no small task for a son to pay a proper tribute to the memory of a beloved mother.  Words are inadequate to express the feelings, the emotions and grief that follow.  To place out of sight a form that we have so often embraced in infancy and in manhood, carries the mind back to the sweetest memories of life and recalls innumerable incidents of that maternal love so much stronger than death, so tender, so devoted and so unselfish, thrilling the heart with love and affection.  But it is no small consolation to know that she is far happier in the realms of bliss than she was in this world of sorrow and trouble, trials and tribulations.  “I am so tired,” she often remarked while yet conscious; but she is now forever at rest, the sweet rest of a weary soul, in the land of the good, the home of the Christian, the bliss of the saint.  While the heart may swell with grief and bereavement, the mind is confident that the end of mortal life with mother was but the entrance of the blessed immortality of the soul into the joys of eternal happiness.

In the silent wood, at the old homestead, two miles west of Newnan, Ga., on Friday evening last, the remains of a loved mother were laid beside those of an honored father who died March 9th, 1843, and upon whose tombstone the epitaph reads, “An Honest Man,” and upon the tombstone of the mother shall be chiseled the epitaph of “An Honest Woman.”  These express all that can be written of the good man or the good woman.

There they sleep for ever!—the lullaby of the murmuring winds through the green forest being their sweetest and holiest requiem!

**************

August 3, 1882,  Page 3

The late Mrs. Defoor.

[Another notice of the death of Linda Myra Defoor, aged 78, 28 years a resident of Atlanta.  “She was also the stepmother of Martin Defoor, who was murdered with his wife, near the Chattahoochee river, some two or three years ago.”]