Aunt Tillie could tell you about nearly drowning in a hurricane, fighting off a monkey, or spending two days in an overturned car like she was telling you about going to the grocery store.
Just another day in the life of Aunt Tillie.
Tillie Murphy Mudd was my great-great-aunt on my Granny Audrey Savoie Daigle’s side of the family. She was my Grandma Cooney’s sister, a Murphy on her father’s side and a Quinn on her mother’s side. Born in 1911, she died in 2005 at the age of 95.
When I was growing up, we would go to her house every Easter to hunt eggs. Back then, she was simply Aunt Tillie, the lady whose house we went to for Easter or came over to Granny's for Sunday lunch. It took me getting older to appreciate just how much life that woman had survived.
Granny often talked about Hurricane Audrey striking Cameron in 1957. She told us about the people who were washed away (over 500 perished), the families who lost loved ones, and the ones who somehow lived to tell about it.
One of those survivors was Aunt Tillie.
She and her mother, Annie Laura Quinn Murphy, were riding out the hurricane in their house in Cameron. Tillie said they woke up to the wind blowing and the Gulf coming toward them from the south. By the time they realized they needed to leave, water was already covering the road.
There was no getting out in the car.
They stayed in the house and prayed.
Then the wind and water lifted the house off its foundation. For a while, it floated. Then it broke apart.
Tillie tried to stay with her mother, but the storm pulled them away from each other.
She remembered waves washing over her and grabbing for anything that might keep her afloat. Somewhere in all that water and wreckage, she caught hold of a floating door.
As the storm carried her inland, she became tangled in barbed wire from a fence. There were branches and debris all around her. She remembered seeing snakes and dead animals—nutria, alligators, and cows.
Tillie floated about twelve miles north of where her house had stood, all the way to the Intracoastal Waterway. A rescue boat finally picked her up, and she was taken to St. Patrick Hospital.
Granny said that two days after the storm, her and Papa went to the hospital looking for survivors.
They walked right past Aunt Tillie’s room.
They did not recognize her.
She was so badly cut, bruised, and swollen from the wire and debris she got tangled in, that her own family could not tell who she was. Granny said it took another two days before Tillie could speak well enough to let the hospital staff know her name.
Her mother, my great-great-grandmother Laura Quinn Murphy, did not survive.
I think about that part now. The Aunt Tillie whose house we visited for Easter had been pulled away from her mother, in that very yard, in a hurricane and carried miles inland through barbed wire and wreckage. As a child, I knew the story. I don’t think I understood the weight of it.
Years later, Tillie was visiting her daughter in Houston and babysitting her granddaughter when she saw a monkey out in the yard.
Now, most people see a strange animal in the yard and leave the door shut. But Tillie called her daughter, who told her it was the neighbor’s monkey.
Apparently, that made opening the door seem reasonable.
The monkey came inside and went wild.
Tillie tried to protect her granddaughter and get it back out of the house. The monkey fought her the whole way, biting, scratching, and pulling her hair.
She said that money tore her up but all she could think at the time was to protect her granddaughter.
In fact, Aunt Tillie said fighting that monkey was worse than going through Hurricane Audrey wrapped in barbed wire.
That is quite a statement coming from someone who had done both.
But the craziest part was what they learned afterward.
It wasn’t the neighbor’s monkey.
It was another monkey.
I have always wondered - how was it possible that so many people in Houston, Texas had pet monkeys that you could get them mixed up.
Then, when Tillie was in her late eighties and living in Bryan, Texas, she had another ordeal.
She was driving to the store one day when her car went off the road and flipped into a ditch. Apparently, the ditch was so steep and deep that nobody knew she was down there.
She wasn’t found for two days.
Two days in an overturned car, in her late eighties.
Aunt Tillie lived through things that would have been enough for several lifetimes. Yet she could tell you about them so matter-of-factly that you almost had to stop her and think about what she had just said.
So whenever you’re having a bad day, remember Aunt Tillie.
You could be wrapped in barbed wire, fighting a monkey, or lying upside down in a car somewhere.
It could always be worse.
And somehow, Aunt Tillie lived long enough to tell us about all three.
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