During World War II newsman Paul Harvey began dedicating a portion of his Monday-Friday broadcasts to something he called “The Rest of the Story”. It became so popular that ABC Radio Networks gave the segment its own series in 1976—a series that always ended with the line “And now you know . . . the rest of the story.”
Well, today I have a story I want to complete—a story I began a few weeks ago with a picture of a well-worn path through a cemetery . . . a path made by a man who walked it consistently, day after day, visiting the grave of someone who meant the world to him. Someone whose name I didn’t know because there were several graves around what appeared to be his destination.
On September 26, 2023, that man—Everette Dewayne Turnbow—died, and that was when I learned the rest of his story. The story of his life and his never-ending love for his wife Cheryl.
Cheryl left Everette in 2009, June 16th to be exact, snatched from him and the life they had built, from their two children and their four grandchildren, by Death. After almost 47 years of marriage, he was without her. He had spent 22 years of his life in the United States Army, and she had spent 19 of those as an Army wife, traveling with her husband from Ft. Hood, Texas to Nuremberg, Germany, then back to the states and Ft. Knox, Kentucky. Everette had been born in Adamsville and for a while, possibly when he was deployed to Vietnam, she came to Hardin County before returning to Germany. Ft. Knox was in the rotation again before a final duty station in Butzbach, Germany. When Everette retired in 1981, they chose Savannah as their permanent home—a home they shared until her death 28 years later.
And thus began his odyssey. Every day that he could, he visited her grave, walking the same path from the drive to her place of rest and then back again. The grave crew often saw him there in the mornings around 8:00. And they saw him in the afternoons when they had a grave to open or a burial to complete. He usually had a companion with him . . . a small dog on a leash that walked to his right, creating its own distinct path beside that of its master. A path that slowly disappeared after his little buddy died.
Sometime during those fourteen years we buried someone along his way and eventually set a monument at the head of the new grave. Everette jokingly told the crew they were making him walk further, as his route had to swing a little wider—but his destination never changed. Nor did his devotion.
I don’t know when Everette stopped going to visit the grave of his beloved wife, but I’m absolutely certain it was only because he could no longer physically make that journey. On Saturday, September 30th, we laid him beside his Cheryl. There will be no more daily trips to the cemetery. No more longing for what once was. They are eternally together now and before too much longer, the path will begin to slowly disappear. But we’ll always remember the man whose devotion created it, and the love that allowed it to endure.
About the author: Lisa Shackelford Thomas is a fourth-generation member of a family that’s been in funeral service since 1926. She has been employed at Shackelford Funeral Directors in Savannah, Tennessee for over 40 years and currently serves as the manager there. Any opinions expressed here are hers and hers alone and may or may not reflect the opinions of other Shackelford family members or staff.
