My Grandmothers Ability to Foretell the Future

This story concerns my Grandmother Olive Sapp.  (This a different grandmother than my black panther story.)

I do not have an exact birth year of my Grandmother, though she was probably born in the early 1920's.  When she was a child, she attended her older bother Samuel's school play.  As the play went on, my grandmother leans over to her mother and says, "Mom, Sam is going to be in a war and he's going to die."

Olive Sapp

When the United States entered the Second World War, my great uncle Samuel J Sapp entered the service, on April 4th 1942.

On January 16th, 1945, serving under General Patton's 6th Armored Division, my great uncle was stationed in Belgium, fighting in the last bloody days of the European campaign.

Samuel J Sapp

While in his tank, a German solider jumped up top of it, opened the hatch and threw inside, a live German hand grenade with a fuse of only 4 seconds. There was no chance of escape.  He was 27 years old.  Three months away from his 28th birthday.

I have in my possession, my great uncles death and purple heart certificates.

My Great Uncles Grave at the Luxembourg American Cemetery & Memorial

When my grandmother grew to adulthood, she married and gave birth to my mother.  A few years before I was born in the late 1960's, my mother was in her mid 20's talking to my grandmother, and as my mother told it, she was driving the poor woman crazy, going on and on wondering whenever she would find her Mr Right.  Exasperated, my grandmother put down what she was doing and in a huff said; "Ronda, the man you're going to marry is in Vietnam right now and his name is Mark!"

Well, neither of them knew a man named Mark and probably didn't know anyone in Vietnam.

A few years passed and my mother met and man named Mark, and who had served in Vietnam.  They married and had two children, me and my sister.

My grandmother never really spoke about it to me. I heard the stories from my parents. She was however, a very spiritual person. She was raised as a Baptist and she would take my sister and I to church in West Virginia, where during services, when the preacher was speaking, my grandmother would have her eyes closed, listening to the sermon and saying in a hushed voice, "Yes Jesus." I've heard the some Baptists speak in tongues. My grandmother did not do that, but I know she was close to something in that church, in a kind of altered state of awareness.

Olive Sapp, late 1940's, early 1950's

My grandmother has been gone for some 15 years now.  I wish I could ask her what other things she had predicted, but mostly, I just wish I could talk with her about my relatives and hear the stories she use to tell.    
- Mark