As he lay dying, a billow of dust boiled behind his
house on Shirahland Road in Mitchell County.
His son and friends weren’t going to let Ray Shirah’s possibly best-ever
crop of peanuts not get to market. Ten
days ago, I held the hand of my brother-in-law, as he was near the end of a seven-year
battle with cancer. Listening to his
soft voice, I could see—through the window—the cloud of topsoil being churned
by the peanut picker 200 yards away.
Forty-eight
years ago, on Aug. 23, Ray; his brother, Tim; and their dad, Lamar, parked
their peanut pickers early for a special event—a wedding at Hopeful Baptist
Church. I can still hear Pam’s dad, “You
mean you planned a wedding right in the middle of peanut season?” Lamar said it playfully. And as luck would have it, a thunderstorm
rolled through that afternoon. Tractors
would have been idle anyway.
But
“idle” was not Ray’s way or anyone else’s way in his family. “Industrious” comes close to describing their
four-generations-deep farming DNA. A
parching drought almost killed farming in 1954. A yellowed Atlanta Journal article shows a rail-thin Lamar with his
first-in-Southwest-Georgia deep-well irrigation system. Several decades later, Ray was on the cover
of Progressive Farmer magazine. He was a pioneer in using a GPS system to
guide his mammoth John Deere and tell it how to distribute nourishment to the
soil his daddy and granddaddy had plowed—first with mules and then with
toy-like Ford 8-N tractors.
Ray
remembered the day he had trouble swallowing.
Tests determined there was a problem with his esophagus. Cancer was the
culprit. His doctor warned, “You might
have six months.” That was in 2010.
Every day, he prayed for the strength to beat the odds. And before long,
he was sharing his story from pulpits across the rural landscape. Several in those congregations took heed and
caught their cancer earlier. They
rejoiced to be alive and to be able to thank him.
When
Ray left Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College (ABAC), he knew where he was
going—back to the farm. He was a
farmer’s farmer, but he was so much more. He learned to fly his Cessna 172, and he
enjoyed the aerial views of his family’s farms.
Ray
had the patience of Job, taking things apart and putting them back
together. He was a good teacher. More than once, he traveled to South America
to teach farmers how to operate and maintain giant cotton combines. Like his dad—with a toolbox—he could fix just
about anything. He couldn’t fix his
health, but he fought to stay mentally and spiritually healthy.
Even
in the slog of round after round of chemo treatments, he found the strength to
stay competitive with his shotgun in sporting-clay events. And when you thought “there’s no way,” Ray and Angie would be
off on a snow-skiing or scuba-diving adventure.
Two weeks before his heart gave
out, he announced, “Let’s go camping.”
With another couple, they hitched his fifth-wheel to his throaty diesel
Ford, and off they went to Lake Seminole. A happy time for Ray was when he was immersed in music,
especially if he was strumming his guitar. Even in his illness, he never lost
his sense of humor. His loudest laughs were on himself.
That
spirit, that strength and that faith are why you have to admire and love people
like Ray Shirah. A mutual friend, Richard Lenz, who was
responsible for the photo of Ray with his dad and brother, Tim, standing in a
cotton field, emailed to say, “Ray was a
beautiful man … one of the toughest, smartest and nicest persons to walk the
planet.”
I
couldn’t say it any better.
Rest
in peace, my brother.
dnesmith@cninewspapers.com
