Katherine Roach dealt with her many life problems with hard prayer and hard work. She always found a smile for everyone who walked through her door. But in her final four years, Katherine, who died Monday at age 94, suffered a heartache that she found almost unbearable.
"I can’t remember the names of my children," she would say. "How is that possible? I love my children. It’s not possible that I can’t say their names."
Maybe it was a series of small strokes, or the lingering effects of treatment for lung cancer and later breast cancer. Whatever caused the mind to fade, Katherine was determined to hold onto one piece of herself that she was most proud of: the mother who loved her children so fiercely she left them for an entire year.
Katherine was a survivor of severe depression. In the year she dedicated to overcoming the crippling effects of the disease, she also began to remake herself from a country homemaker into a national speaker and advocate for recovery from depression.
Katherine found her voice, and her way of mothering a greater portion of the world, by working with Recovery International, a mental health organization whose program is based on self-control, self-confidence and increasing one's determination to act.
Recovery International was a natural fit for Katherine. "Determination to act" fit her style.
Her parents, Newt and Roxie Tynes, raised Katherine and her older brother N.J. in a cabin in the Oak Level woods; her school years and the Great Depression arrived about the same time. She wasn’t much older when N.J. died following a long illness. The Depression was an anxious time already and N.J.’s death almost devastated the young family. After N.J. died, Katherine lived as an only child until she was 11, when the family expanded to include two more daughters, Mary Brooks and Carol Ruth. However, to her parents Katherine forever remained the child who was known simply as "Daughter."
Katherine had been raised with the love of God and the love of her parents, and she was taught the life necessities for a woman of her time: how to sew dresses, whip up biscuits and make a quilt, how to hoe the garden and strip tobacco, even how to quiet a squalling toddler by riding her on a horse — everyday transportation in the pre-war years in Marshall County. Fully equipped, Katherine was determined to create her own family.
At age 20 she found her life’s love in a World War II soldier from Benton, Garland Roach. Katherine was excited to enjoy her first taste of life outside Marshall County as an Army wife, moving from Hattiesburg, Miss, to Detroit, Mich., and spots between. By 1946 the family expanded to include Curtis. Three years later there was Nancy. By now the Army years had ended and the family had taken up what would become permanent residence in the Marshall County area. A couple of years later along came Gentry, and only a few of years after that Sam, and then baby Laura — five children sandwiched within 14 years.
Katherine held her family together through steady paychecks and no paychecks, finding ways to keep going that many would have overlooked — a paper route, opening a doughnut shop, canning food from the garden — and her devotion to her children and her husband were the constants in her life. Determination to stay with them and stay part of their lives drove her to deal aggressively with her depression, and rewarded her with the unpaid career as a public speaker, telling the world, "If I did this, you can do it too. Don’t think it’s going to be easy, but here are your tools."
She sometimes had to live that determination to act on a large scale. At an age when she was known to the neighborhood kids as Grandma Roach, Katherine fell into a second motherhood. Gentry’s wife Sue was killed by a drunk driver, leaving behind a newborn, a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old. Katherine became their new mother. When they, too, grew up, graduated college and moved on, and after she lost her husband to cancer after 55 years together, Katherine filled her days with the quilting ladies at First Methodist Church, looking after her neighbors and piecing together a remarkable collection of resources to keep her house in good repair. She also enjoyed surprising the world from time to time with smaller acts of determination, like taking a vacation to Washington, D.C., where she received a private tour of the Capitol with a young lady she had taught in Sunday School.
Katherine Roach, born Oct. 31, 1923, died in the early morning hours of May 21, 2018, after almost a century of determined acts and a few years of frustrating forgetfulness. She is survived by Mary Brooks Smith of Benton, Ky., Carol Rudd of Clinton Township, Mich., and of course, her beloved Curtis, Nancy, Gentry, Sam and Laura, 12 grandchildren, 8 step-grandchildren, 18 great grandchildren and 3 great-great grandchildren.
Visitation will be from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thursday at Collier Funeral Home in Benton, with the funeral at 2 p.m. and burial following at Marshall County Memorial Gardens. The family has requested donations to the First United Methodist Church of Benton in lieu of flowers.
