How God Comforts Through Grief

The Goodness of God in the Evening Breeze

Life is so good, sometimes I forget that God is under no obligation to make it so. This is where so many people get hung up on faith, I think: How can a God who is supposed to be good allow bad things to happen?  It's the burning question, isn't it?

We wonder about big things, of course, like cancer, war, famine, natural disaster, suffering on a grand scale, and the most ugly, fearsome father of it all: death.

But seemingly little, personal things are just as troubling, aren't they?
"I didn't get that job. Now look where we are."
"My friend betrayed me."
"I can't kick this illness/pain."
"The timing of this is just...awful."
Why, why, WHY?
My divorce.  My wayward kid.  My bully.  My addiction.  My inner-demon.  My parents.  My pride.  And on and on.  Isn't God out there? Can't he hear me?  Why won't he make himself known?  He's supposed to be good and kind and loving and merciful.  His mercies are supposed to be new every day.  This feels like a dead end.  It feels like a sort of death.

I could go on for 10,000 words, describing the senseless, often preventable suffering in this world.  Despite all of our knowledge, our GPS, our technology, our information, our compassion, our money, our resources, our superior intellect, we have not figured out how to eliminate it, or even to alleviate it.  Isn't that remarkable?  All the lessons humans have learned over the ages and we still make the same mistakes.  We still suffer for the same stupid reasons.

Yet, for all that is wrong in the world, I can still sit on my patio, which isn't really even mine.  I just get to stay here for a little while.  On it I have placed a cushioned chair and a table.  A cup of coffee.  A notebook and a pen.  A pleasant breeze.  A dog at my feet.  The sun is up.  The kids are not.  Just for a moment, this is really good.  LIFE is really good. My life.  It isn't perfect.  It would be melodramatic of me to say that I suffer but have my demons, I suppose, just like everyone.  For this moment they are quiet and THIS, my life, is beautiful.

I think this is what Adam and Even felt in the garden after they ate the fruit.  They didn't die like God said would happen.  Maybe there was a shaky sigh of relief as they walked away from the serpent, who, as it turned out, wasn't totally dishonest with them after all.  But something was broken in them and they knew it because they hid in shame.  It's difficult to fathom the dread they must have felt as they tried in vain to cover themselves, attempting to bandage what they broke by sticking a band-aid made of fig leaves to a wound that gushed and disfigured their souls.

I can only imagine (because the bible doesn't say) that before their eyes, what was once paradise became pestilence.  The flies and mosquitoes probably started bothering them.  The sun burned too bright and caused them to perspire.  Maybe Adam's sinuses began to swell with an allergic reaction to the pollen in the air.

And then God did something surprising.  Genesis 3:8 describes, "cool evening breezes."  Isn't that an interesting detail to include in this spare narrative?  God knew of their transgression, right down to the second it happened.  He understood it, probably better than they understood it themselves.  Yet he sent them the small comfort and joy and sweetness of a cool evening breeze.  He did that anyway.  An undeserved gift.

The hammer came down, as they knew it would.  They took the curse and walked out of the garden, sorrowful, humiliated, and realizing, finally, that God was truthful from the beginning.  There was a death sentence.  It just wouldn't be carried out right away.  They would get to live out their lives and yes, there would be suffering before it was all over, but there would also be "cool evening breezes."  There would be knowing smiles, and inside jokes, and laughter, and joy, and beauty.  There would be family, there would be friendship, there would even be art.

They deserved none of those things and neither do I.  God gives those gifts anyway and perhaps he adds to them the greatest gift of all--the dreaded death sentence.  With death comes the release from the suffering of this life.  Death brings life eternal.  Without death, there would be a never-ending life of shame and separation, which would be far, far worse than any suffering humans have concocted for ourselves on this broken earth.

Yes.  God is still good.

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Dying Well

Hank DuBose died on a Tuesday.  It was a beautiful day in early March and he commented on it several times to his wife because it followed a string of cold, wet, miserable days.  He may have secretly, briefly thought of the things he'd be doing to his yard if he was in his own home instead of in this place for "Old Fogies" as he called them, but he didn't let on because that's the kind of man Hank was.  He thought you needed a little darkness to see the stars and he always looked forward to things to come.

His wife Alice made him take his jacket before they went to dinner.  He protested but she knew the deceptive nature of these March days.  It would be summer as long as the sun shined but as soon as the shadows of evening came out, it would be winter again.  He had taken the jacket from her, and hooked it over his arm, and talked of the pulled meat sandwiches they would eat in the cafeteria.

There was a lull in the conversation as they walked together on the sidewalk.  Then he collapsed.  She tried to break his fall but she was surprised at the heaviness of his body.  His arms stayed down at his sides and he scraped his elbow and his forehead on the sidewalk when he landed with a sickening thud.  She knew instinctively that he would never wake up.  Fear filled her as she always knew it would but there was a calm in her too.  She rolled him flat on his back, flicked the dirt off his sleeve, and held his hand until the medics arrived.

The next day, when Hank's daughter told her friends the news, they clucked and sighed and apologized and their eyes welled for her.  She held her hands up and said with a sad smile, "It's ok.  Really, it is.  He was a Christian for most of his life and this is the way he always wanted to go: in possession of all his faculties, next to the woman he loved, looking forward to things.  He always wanted it to be sudden."

It was a comforting thought to us, her friends, and the prayer flew into my mind before I could stop it: God, let me go like that too.  Still healthy at the end of a long life, not sick and bedridden, my body wearing out before my heart is ready to stop beating.  In the presence of my family who still loves me, thinking I'm going to dinner in 15 minutes.  Just walking along and BOOM.  Or maybe as I sleep, dreaming of the breakfast I'm going to eat when the sun comes up.  That's how I want to die.  Thank you for taking Hank that way.  Take me like that too.

That's what dying well looks like, I thought.

But even as I said the prayer I knew that God already sees the end of my days.  He knows how it will be, whether or not there will be suffering, and the answer to that plea for things to be comfortable at the end might be "Yes," but it also might be, "No."

And then I thought of the story of Abigail Smith, who suffered so greatly in her young life before cancer took her.

And I realized the pointlessness of such a plaintive request for God to make things easy for me.

It was His goodness that Hank should have had such a comfortable death but it was also His goodness that in Abigail's suffering, 30,000 people would hear through her story that He can take something evil and make it His business to redeem it for something good.

That's what God is about.

Not making life or death easy.

So my prayer is different now.

God, take me in Your time and in Your way.  All I ask is the courage to face it in a way that brings others to a closer understanding of Your goodness.  Amen.

Responding to Grace

Tis not the work of force but skill

To find the way into men's will.

Tis love alone can hearts unlock.

Who knows the Word, he needs not knock.

Richard Crashaw - 1652

Grace loved Chester but Chester didn't love Grace in return.  She knows it.  You can feel her insecurity in the letters she wrote to him in the summer of 1906. 

My Dear Chester,
...I think I shall die of joy when I see you, dear.  I will try not to worry so much and I won't believe the horrid things the girls write...

You can also tell that Chester wasn't a very good person but Grace didn't mind.

...You have said you would come and sometimes I just know you will, but then I think about other things and I am just as certain you won't come....

She loved him anyway and held onto the hope that he would come for her.  She had given him everything there was for a girl to give to a boy and she waited anxiously for him to respond to her proclamations of love.  He never spoke affectionately in the 3 letters he wrote back to her dozens.  She even apologized in one letter for how affectionate she was in hers and tried to mimic his curt, businesslike tone.  But by the next letter, she was back to worrying over why he hadn't written, and proclaiming her love again, and wondering when he would come.

Unrequited love is so unfair.  I see Grace as a young woman who has taken a gamble by baring her soul to a man who may or may not love her back.  She stands there trembling and naked before him, while he remains fully clothed and buttoned up, from his hat all the way down to his boots, arms firmly crossed over his chest, revealing nothing, risking nothing.  That way she is the only one who stands to lose.

This happened once in the bible.  Not in a romantic way but the risk was no less inherent in the gamble Jonathan took when he proclaimed his undying loyalty to his friend, David.  1 Samuel 18:3-4: "And Jonathan made a solemn pact with David because he loved him as he loved himself.  Jonathan sealed the pact by taking off his robe and giving it to David, together with his tunic, sword, bow, and belt."  We don't know what David's response was because the bible doesn't give it.  The scene shifts abruptly and Jonathan is left standing there, naked and defenseless, and without a response to this lavish display.

We know a little bit about Chester's response to Grace through her letters.  He accepted her affection enough to get her pregnant before almost totally ignoring her.  She begged and pleaded with him to take responsibility and not be a coward, to come to her parent's house where she was burdened with her secret--his baby--and take her away.  She worried to the point of making herself ill and confessed to fainting when she received a letter from a girl Chester knew, admitting to things that Chester did in Grace's absence.  But it was too late for her to walk away with any dignity.  She needed him to come for her and she desperately wanted him to love her. 

Forget for a moment that life was different for an unwed mother in 1906.  These are things we all long for.  When we have physically, emotionally, and spiritually given all we have to give, we want it to be given back in full measure.  We will be forever incomplete and feel cheated if it's not.

In the surprise of the young century, Chester did show up at Grace's door, told her to pack her bags, and took her away.  You can just bet that everything about that day got instantly brighter for Grace, can't you?  The twinge of morning sickness evaporated.  The shadows on the front lawn, which once seemed so ominous and foreboding, were now merely dappled evidence of the sunshine which was finally going to beat down on her face as she joined her savior on the front stoop, carpetbag in hand, future secure.  I imagine the relief, the feeling of pure joy, that must have seeped through her veins at the sight of him standing there before her.  I imagine the way she must have thrown her arms around his neck and basked for a wonderful moment in the assurance of his love for her. 

They went to a resort in the Adirondacks and stayed in a hotel for the night.  Grace must have assumed he would take her to a chapel or to a Justice of the Peace to marry her quickly and quietly.  But he didn't.  The next day he killed her and dumped her body in Moose Lake.

Tragically, Jonathan lost his life too in a senseless killing.  Not because of David, though.  In fact, we learn in 1 Samuel 20 that David fully reciprocated Jonathan's friendship and loved him just as fiercely.  They often risked their lives for one another and kept each other alive when King Saul would have killed them both.  It was the original bro-mance!  So why did the prophet Samuel, author of his first book, leave us hanging for two whole chapters, wondering at David's response to Jonathan?  Maybe what's left out of the bible can be just as telling as what's left in.  Maybe by leaving David unresponsive, Samuel is giving us a sneak-peak at the coming of a Savior who would give of himself so lavishly, all that would be left would be his naked body, trembling, and dying in front of people who didn't know what to make of Him.  He still evokes a range of responses in us.  Some of us fall on our faces in a twisting anguish of undeserving gratitude.  Some of us weep quietly and make a simple promise to start going to church again.  Sometimes there is no response at all.  He knew this was a risk He was taking but it didn't stop Him from coming and giving everything there was to give.

What's your response?  Are you preoccupied like Chester?  Are you too busy living life, and having fun, and skirting responsibility, and doing things your own way to stop and notice what's already been given to you?  You can stand there with your mouth shut like David in chapter 18 and leave Him hanging.  You can even turn away from it and ignore Him.  That's your right as a human being who was made to choose.  But it's been done so you have to choose one way or the other.

You can choose to respond like Chester did when he dumped his gift in the lake, preferring life without it.  But your choice won't be ignored forever.  Grace was known by the people in Chester's life.  She was missed when she was gone.   The authorities drug the lake and recovered her body.  The truth could not stay hidden and Chester would have to answer for his choice.  He went to trial in a case that captivated America.  Grace's letters were read to the jury and when they heard her plaintive cries for his love, and felt her vulnerability as she sat and waited for him, it moved them to recommend execution for young Chester, who only ever wanted to have fun.  He died by electrocution on March 30, 1908.

Friends, if you think there is nothing more to this life than having a little bit of fun before you die, go ahead.  No one will stop you.  You may not go to the extremes Chester did to cling to that thin thread of independence, but you know your life will one day come to a grinding halt.  Maybe tomorrow.  Maybe in 70 years.  But know too that you have been given a lavish gift.  Consider it with awe and wonder.  Respond to it.  Reach out to Grace now.  Take its hand, and then let it throw its arms around your neck and say into your ear, "Finally.  I've been waiting for you."



Quotes from Grace's letters come from the book, "A Northern Light" by Jennifer Donnelly.  Information about Chester's execution comes from (I know, I know) Wikipedia.

Delivered

Evelyn settled herself into the cushioned chair, set her purse on the floor, and used her orthotics-clad foot to slide it under her seat.  There were 20 or 30 chairs in this small, shadowy room and thanks to the thoughtful design of stadium seating, the spectators would get a great view.  As if they had come here to watch a movie or a ball game and not to watch somebody die.

There was an armed guard standing in the corner, wearing a baseball cap of all things (the casualization of society, she called this), watching people trickle in.  There were a few she figured were reporters.  Who else would want to memorialize this event with a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen?  Some faces she recognized from the trial as families of the victims.  One of them was a victim.  Evelyn tried not to look at her.  She sat two seats away and one row down.  The woman had been shot and raped and left to die but somehow survived.  Her testimony at the trial was horrific and is probably what convinced the jury to vote unanimously for death.  In a perverted sort of way that Evelyn would have denied if anyone had asked her about it, she hoped the woman got some kind of satisfaction out of today.  Then at least one good thing would come out of her son's life.

She kept her eyes on the window in front of her and wondered if it was a one-way glass.  Maybe Richard wouldn't even know she was here.  Maybe it was best that way.  She thought of him as a boy and how he would stick out his hand, and wave a big goofy wave, and say, "Hi, Mom!" when he saw her, the way he did when she was 15 minutes late picking him up from school once.  He was the only student left and stood on the sidewalk with a teacher who lifted her watch and stared at it when Evelyn arrived.  Richard never doubted that she would be there for him eventually.  She hadn't once come to visit him in prison.  

Time had stopped for her around the time he was convicted 11 years ago.  She knew intellectually that he was no longer a boy and that a grown man of 29 would walk through the door on the other side of that glass, but she preferred to live in her memories, a time of promises made, before she knew they wouldn't come to pass.  Not in Richard's lifetime anyway.

The door to the room beyond the glass opened and Richard walked through in his baggy orange jumper, hands behind his back, followed by a physician and a man in a suit.  Richard said, "You want me to sit?"  Evelyn was shocked she could hear voices.  She thought it would be sound proof and panicked a bit at what she might hear in his last moments.  Despite everything, she didn't want to hear him suffer.  The man in the suit told him not to sit just yet and took the handcuffs off.  He bumped Richard lightly as he moved around him in the small space and Evelyn heard her son's voice again saying, "Pardon me," as he rubbed his wrists.

They nudged Richard toward a gurney in the center of the room and sat him down on a plastic green mattress and hooked him up to a heartrate monitor, which seemed to her like a waste.  Thin black velcro straps dangled limp from the sides of the bed, jostling with Richard's weight in a grotesque little dance. 

Richard was calm.  More calm than she'd ever seen him, though to be fair, the last time they were together he was on drugs.  For six excruciating years, his eyes were either dilated and darting all over the place or glazed over, hollow and sunken.  Now they were clear and blue.  His face was clean shaven.  He looked so...healthy.  There wasn't even a tremor in his hand as he stretched his arm out to have the inside of his elbow swabbed with alcohol by the physician, another waste of time it seemed to her, and have an IV started.  

He laid down and inched his body up the mattress a bit to position his head on the little white pillow.  The man in the suit fastened the velcro around Richard's arms and legs.  He mumbled something she couldn't hear and Richard looked up at him and nodded.  She thought Richard would be scared but he wasn't.  He was just expectant, as if he was being strapped into a ride at an amusement park and had just been asked by the bored, sweaty, zit-plagued employee if the straps were tight enough.  "Enjoy the ride," the teenaged boy would say, and it would have been vaguely appropriate here but that's not what the man said.  He asked Richard if he had any last words.  Richard stared unblinking at the ceiling and said, "Life is death, death is life. I hope that someday this absurdity that humanity has come to will come to an end.  Life is too short. I hope anyone that has negative energy towards me will resolve that.  Life is too short to harbor feelings of hatred and anger. That's it, Warden."

Evelyn gripped the arms of her chair.  It was all she could do to keep herself from standing up and facing the room and giving a proper statement for Richard.  She wanted them to know that he was sorry for killing his own brother with a 20-gauge shotgun.  He was sorry for shooting those two other women, raping one of them, and leaving them all for dead.  He had to be.  She wasn't mother to a monster. 

She labored for 26 hours to bring Richard into the world.  His head was stuck for so long in the birth canal, when he finally emerged it was misshapen and lopsided and covered in meconium.  His nose never did quite straighten out but she loved him even more for it.  "Look what we did!" she had whispered excitedly to her husband in the dark early morning hours after his birth.  "This is the one.  Our deliverer," she said, welling with pride over her beautiful boy.  He was born with the promise of greatness and he could get Evelyn back home where she belonged.  She didn't deserve to go back after what she had done but the promise had been made and she trusted that it would be kept.  Richard would save them all.

She reminded him of it often, even when he began resenting her for it.  The summer Richard turned 12 was when her faith in him began to waver.  He'd been in trouble more than he was out of it and she stood at the stove, stirring a pot of pasta and letting him have it.  In her mind, she liked to see herself as June Cleaver with her apron, flats, and pearls, in control of every situation, telling him why he needed to stop this behavior and come to his senses.  "We're all depending on you, Richard.  Don't forget that."  But in reality, she was barefoot, uncombed, exhausted, stressed to the point of sickness, and the pasta water had boiled over, hissing and bubbling, scorching the glass stove top. 

"I don't give a (the foulest expletive in the English language, in her opinion) about the promise!" Richard shouted.  Her fingers froze, just short of the knob to turn the heat down, and she stood like a statue while he railed at her.  "Andy never gets this bull(another vile expletive that makes her cringe to remember).  Why don't you do this to Andy?  You leave Andy alone and you're always on my back!"  Of course that was peppered with proclamations of hating her and wishing she was dead, but that wasn't what haunted Evelyn about the exchange.  Later, she scrubbed furiously at the stovetop with her brillo and Softscrub, stunned that he was jealous of Andy.  If anyone had a reason to resent her, it was Andy, who was always being overlooked and disregarded in favor of Richard. She didn't mean for it to be like that but so much was at stake for Richard and Andy just...was.  Andy, eternally sweet Andy, never held it against her.  He loved everyone and did everything that was asked of him without complaint.  He was probably professing his love for his brother right up until Richard shot him.   

Evelyn was constantly going over the years leading up to that nightmare in her mind, redoing scenes in her imagination that might have changed the trajectory, if only she would have known what Richard was capable of.  One scene she would have like to do over was the evening her husband had been working late in the fields.  Richard approached him and demanded to be paid for his labor.  His father laughed in his face and told him his labor was unacceptable, and that it took a lot of nerve to walk up to him in this field with his hand out, as if he owed Richard something.  Richard faunched and fumed and sputtered horrible things about hating his father then too. 

Evelyn would have gone beyond praying if she had another chance at that night.  She would have begged and pleaded with him, disgracing herself if need be, to get him to return to his father with a contrite and humble heart, knowing her husband would never turn him away.  Nothing would have worked though; she knew that now.  Richard's resentment morphed into an all-consuming bitterness.  The whole family walked on eggshells around him.  His anger bubbled to the surface any time he didn't get his way.  Drugs entered their house.  Richard dropped out of high school.  A stolen car led to jail, then probation.  Finally, the unthinkable in a field 16 miles outside town.  An act so heinous, Evelyn refused to believe it until she watched Richard in the courtroom, cold and remorseless, not denying that he had done it.

Richard came back to the house after killing Andy to sleep off a drug-induced high.  He woke up famished, drank half of a gallon of milk while he stood in front of the open refrigerator, and kissed Evelyn on the top of her head before walking out the door to take care of his "business," which she now knew was to pay off a drug dealer with money from an earlier robbery.

She shuddered in her seat, remembering that kiss, as the warden gave a little nod.  Someone somewhere was flicking a switch, or pushing a button, or depressing a plunger that was shooting poison into Richard's body.   Seconds passed and Richard twisted his head back, raising it up off the pillow, to find the warden who stood behind him. 

"Wow!" Richard shouted. Evelyn jumped in her seat at his outburst.  "That is great. That is awesome! Thank you, (that foul expletive again, an adjective this time) Warden!"  His head fell back on the pillow at an angle that looked like it should have been painful.  His mouth and eyes stayed open but everyone watching from the other side of the glass knew the end had come for Richard.  He was gone.  But the promise wasn't gone with him. 

It was foolish of her to believe that it would be her son.  Her own sins were too greivous.  She never thought in a million years that murder would be the result and she would give her life to undo her mistakes.  But she wouldn't spend the rest of her life grieving Richard either.  He always believed he had a right to his anger and his life reflected that.  He chose to hate and to hurt others.  Now, looking at his dead body, Evelyn could see that the one who was really destroyed was him.  

All around Evelyn, hugs were exchanged, sighs of relief that had been held in for 11 long years were expelled.  But the woman who had been raped hadn't moved.  She stared at Richard's body, seeming totally unsatisfied, maybe even feeling a little jipped.  She probably came here to see him suffer or cry like a pathetic, scared child.  Evelyn wished she didn't feel the inclination to apologize to the woman because her son wasn't more pathetic but there it was.  She was burdened for this woman who would walk out of the room this day with a choice to make as well.

People began to trickle out.  They had seen what they'd come for.  Now it was dinnertime and they would celebrate as they broke bread together at the TGI Friday's across town.

After 15 minutes the doctor entered the room and pronounced Richard dead.  They unhooked the heartrate monitor and wheeled the gurney through the door and out of sight.  Evelyn had already checked the boxes and signed the papers for the prison.  There was nothing left for her to do except to leave this room as well and go home to get on with the rest of her life.  She pulled her purse out from under the chair, hooked it over her shoulder, and stood up, realizing that the woman had remained in her chair, staring through the glass into the now empty execution room.  They locked eyes for a second and Evelyn looked away. 

"You had another child," the woman said rather than asked.  Evelyn choked out a hoarse, "Yes."  She cleared her throat and said it again, clearer this time.  On the one year anniversay of Andy's death, baby Seth had arrived via c-section to her aged body.  In the quiet, early morning hours after his birth, she had whispered to her husband through tears of grief, "The Lord has given us another son in the place of Andy."  Her husband had agreed at the time but as Seth grew, Evelyn realized that Seth was different than Andy. Seth was obedient like Andy, but he also had a love for God that came from somewhere beyond Evelyn's doing or understanding.

Evelyn shuffled through the narrow path between the chairs and timidly laid a hand on the woman's shoulder.  "Choose love.  Choose life."  She paused and said, "So that you can live long after this life is over."  The woman remained stiff and unaffected but Evelyn gave a motherly squeeze and left the room.

Seth had a son named Enosh.
Enosh
Kenan
Mahalelel
Jared
Enoch
Methuselah
Lamech
Noah
Shem
Arphaxad
Shelah
Eber
Peleg
Reu
Serug
Nahor
Terah
Abram
Isaac
Jacob
Judah
...
David
...
Jesus, the promised Deliverer, referred to himself as a Son of Adam (Man) more often than as the Son of God.  





This allegory of Genesis 3:15-4:25 is loosely based on the story of Texas inmate, Richard Cobb's execution in Hunstville on April 25, 2013 as reported by Michael Graczyk, AP.
http://news.msn.com/crime-justice/man-put-to-death-for-texas-store-abduction-slaying

A Story to Tell: Thanking God for the Hard Parts

I submitted this piece about my grandma, Margaret Ruth Barnes (11-15-24 to 12-17-12), to a Ladies Home Journal writing contest while she was still living.  It didn't win but I thought it was a fitting tribute to a lady who taught me how to play Canasta, and Karem, and how to make noodles. I learned to ride my bicycle in her drive way.  She took me to Branson to see Shoji Tibouchi when I was in grade school.  She rocked me in her easy chair the night I threw up in her house even though I had already grown taller than her.  She "clouded up and rained all over me" when I deserved it and always gave me Edy's ice cream with chocolate syrup to make up for it.  She was a complex woman and love seemed to be hard for her with some people but she was a pretty awesome grandma. I will miss her.

We walked, hand in hand, down the wide white hallway.  Being in this place makes me uneasy.  Perhaps it’s the smell of urine that makes my eyes sting.  Or the men and women we steal glances at as we walk past their open doors.  Some of them stare back at us as we pass.  Anyone who is left in their room at dinnertime is confined to their bed.  I can’t imagine what goes on in their minds, hour after hour, day after day.  I see them with their hair matted and spittle on their chins, legs twisted and lifeless in the beds.  Their eyes are sometimes dull and glazed, sometimes confused and crazy.  In the split second that I spy on them as I pass their rooms, I try to imagine what they were like when they were young, vibrant, healthy, and beautiful.  I wonder what kinds of things they did with their lives, how many kids they raised, what adventures they went on, and if there is anyone left to tell their stories.

It makes me sad to think of this Greatest Generation leaving our world one by one.  There will never be another like it.  They were shaped and molded by hardship.  It made them strong and self-sacrificing.  They knew what it was to survive on next to nothing.  And when they had plenty, they were grateful for it and didn’t squander it.  But it was the hardship they endured that gave purpose and meaning to their lives.  Overcoming it gave them a story to tell.

Finally in the dining room, I spot her from across the room, even though all that is visible of her is her tiny head, with her soft white “teased and set” hair peeking out above her wheelchair.  We come around her chair to greet her and her eyes light up in recognition as always, though I’m not convinced she could actually tell us our names.  I don’t ask her to.  I don’t want her to feel bad.  She is wearing a crocheted red sweater and holding a stuffed dog in her lap.  I don’t know who gave her that dog but I’ve never seen her without it when I’ve come to visit her here.

I pull up heavy chairs, scraping them along the tiled floor so that we can sit close to her, despite the plate of pulled meat and green beans that has been placed in front of her.  “How are you, Grandma?” I ask her.  She shrugs her shoulders and smiles, giving me a garbled response that I can’t quite make out.  Her dentures don’t fit inside her mouth anymore so they nearly fall out whenever she tries to form words.  I just smile and nod.

“Three pretty girls,” she says, looking at my daughters.

“Yes,” I tell her.  Placing a hand on each of their heads, I say, “Allison is in second grade, Rachel is in Kindergarten, and Morgan is about to turn three!”  She puts a hand over her mouth as if to feign surprise. 

“Really?” she asks.  “They grow so fast.”  Again, I smile and nod.  I don’t really have any other news.  At least none that I want to share with my grandma, who I’m not convinced yet, knows who I am.  I don’t feel like telling her that my husband lost his job last week.  For the second time in three years.  What difference would it make to her that we had blown our savings getting us through the last time he was unemployed and, having struggled with a decline in income, hadn’t built it back up yet?  Would she care that we didn’t know if we would be able to make our house payment this month?  That there was no way our house was going to sell in this market anyway?  That unemployment was hovering above 9% and it could be a very long, very uncertain, and very painful time ahead of us?

Lost in the thoughts of my own troubles, my mind is yanked back into the dining room when I overhear one of the nurses on duty refer to another one as Shorty.  “Who is Shorty?” I ask, looking between them.  The petite middle-aged woman who is feeding a patient next to my grandma looks over at me and says, “That’s me!”

“Margaret’s husband was called Shorty almost all of his life,” I tell her.

“Is that so?” she asks, continuing to feed her patient.  I begin to tell her how I once found an old high school English textbook of my granddad’s copyrighted in 1934, in which a friend had doodled a face behind bars and jokingly wrote underneath, “Shorty in 15 years” but my story fades when I see that she doesn’t seem all that interested.  That picture has always fascinated me because I never knew much about my grandparents.  I knew they were my dad’s parents; two kind and generous old people whom I stayed with every once in a while and saw on holidays.  They were wonderful grandparents and very much loved.  But they didn’t often speak of their early life and so much of what made them who they were always remained a mystery to me.

I know just a few things about my grandma.  I know that she grew up very poor during the worst of the Great Depression.  She told me once that when she was a young girl she shared a table with another little girl who ate an orange with her lunch.  My grandma had never tasted an orange and the sight and smell of that orange had her transfixed.  When the girl left the table, leaving behind the orange peelings, my grandma ate them.

I know that when she was 16 in 1939 her parents told her she was old enough to take care of herself and not to come home from school.  So she didn’t.  She stayed on the bus that day until the route was finished.  The bus driver asked if she had anywhere to go.  She said she didn’t, so he and his wife took her in and finished raising her.  She learned to drive a stick shift by driving that big old school bus and once told my sister and me that’s why she preferred to drive an automatic.  The wife of that bus driver would later come to be known by us grandkids as “Granny” and she would spend her last years in the care of my grandparents.

I have no idea how Grandma met Granddad but at some point after marrying him, she put herself through beauty school and opened a beauty shop.  She was a working mother and an entrepreneur long before Women’s Lib.  I find this ironic since I sit here, privileged to be born into a world with “equal pay” and I choose to stay home with my girls.  I have no memories of that beauty shop she owned.  By the time I came along a generation later she had semi-retired and was servicing a few loyal customers out of her basement.

My grandparents must have been very successful in life.  They seemed positively rich to us kids.  They certainly did to me now that I sat in front of her as a grown-up, feeling decidedly unsuccessful in life at the moment.  Grandma and Granddad nearly doubled the square footage of their house with a massive renovation.  And they enjoyed traveling a great deal.  They went to Hawaii, Europe, Nova Scotia, and made many weekend trips to Branson, sometimes even taking a few lucky grandkids along.  She brought two little Hawaiian dresses, one red and one blue, back from their trip to the Island for my sister and me.  I had just told my own daughters about those dresses I remembered so vividly from my childhood a few days before so I asked my grandma if she remembered taking that trip all those years ago.

She didn’t.  Did she remember the trip to Europe?  She shook her head no.  All those tour bus trips with your friend, Naomi?  No.  I leaned back in my chair, surprised and disappointed that she had no stories to share.  More than that though, I was sad.  I studied her tiny, fragile, shell of a body, bent over from osteoporosis.  Her hands which had once performed magic on ladies’ permed hair were arthritic and bony, with skin so translucent I could practically see through it.  Once so strong and capable, she had spent a lifetime working, sacrificing, and saving so that she could enjoy the pleasure and luxury of travel and now she didn’t even have a single memory of it.

We left the nursing home after a bit more small talk.  She probably wouldn’t remember we were there so one of my daughters left a homemade picture on her nightstand. 

I pondered that sad conversation often over the next few days.  I couldn’t resist making the comparison: my husband and I are in our 30’s and practically starting over from scratch.  Again.  We may never achieve the wealth and luxury that my grandparents enjoyed.  At least it feels like it in this scary and uncertain moment in time.  My grandparents knew fear and uncertainty very well early in their days but they spent the rest of their lives making sure they never would again. 

Grandma, like me, wanted security.  She pursued it with tenacity because the avoidance of pain was the topmost priority.  And when she achieved it, she rested comfortably in it and lived as if she had never experienced life any other way.  She never really wanted to tell the stories of her youth, the really good stories of overcoming hardship, stories about the things that shaped her.  She only leaked out little bits here and there, leaving us to piece together the picture of her early life.  But today, in the final chapters of her life, those are the parts that really matter.  The trips to Hawaii and Europe have all but faded from memory.  Just like the house, the pinnacle of all they had worked to accomplish. 

Grandma and Granddad had always taken immaculate care of their stately post-war 60’s style ranch.  A quick drive past it today reveals the shrubs, which once sat at attention, crisp, and horizontal against the white siding, are now dead and bare.  The birdbath in the front yard has been knocked over.  A large tree has fallen in the backyard and its dried dead branches hang over the mangled chain-link fence like giant brown, bony fingers.  Their once lovely home with its paid off mortgage, a tangible symbol of comfort and security, now sits in disrepair, abandoned and literally crumbling down with rust, rot, and time.  As if it never even mattered.

Could it be possible that this time of hardship that I am living in right now is what really matters in my life?  No one will remember how many vacations we took or how much comfort and security we had.  I won’t even remember them if my grandma’s state is any indication of the future that awaits me.  But there is a reason that the “stuff” that gives us comfort and security in this world is so quickly forgotten.  Those things are boring.  They don’t make for a good story.  They don’t shape anybody.  And pursuing them will only blind me to the bigger story that is being written for my family today.  We will one day tell a story from this time in our lives that will be about hardship and pain.  But it will also be a story that is about more than personal comfort, self-gratification, and the false sense of security in a world that will pull the rug out from under you at any moment.  It is a story in which life is meaningful without that stuff.  And if a life that experiences pain is meaningful, then the pain must have meaning because it helps to shape the characters in the story of that meaningful life.  The stories from my grandma’s early life and others of her generation prove this to be true. 

If you believe in something greater than yourself, then you can trust that it is God, the greatest storyteller of all, who writes the uncertainty and pain into the stories of our lives.  He does this not because he is cruel and mean-spirited, but because he wants our lives to be filled with meaning and purpose instead of just “stuff.”  Our desperate attempts to avoid pain and seek comfort rob us of the potential greatness of our lives.  The lack of stories from my grandma’s later life proves this to be true. 

Knowing this doesn’t make it easy to live through the painful parts of our stories. I freely admit that I dread the coming months of uncertainty for my family.  So, in order to survive them and not let them destroy me, I have to surrender them to God, trusting that he will bring meaning from them, that something beautiful will come from them.  That beautiful thing may not be a paid for home and a trip to Hawaii.  I think it will be even more wonderful than that. 

I think it will be a story of redemption—a story of a family changed, made stronger, made better.  Comfort and security don’t change people.  It’s the pain that occurs in the darkness of night that changes people.  As long as I have the hope of redemption—that the story will end well—I can endure pain, loss, even suffering.  Indeed, I can be fulfilled by it, knowing that true and lasting joy, not the superficial pleasure that comes from comfort and security, will come as a result of it. 

 I guess there will always be a part of me that, like Grandma, craves security and fights desperately to attain it.  It’s human nature.  Maybe one day I’ll have it within my grasp again and life will be boring.  But until then I have a story to finish.  It will be a story about pain and adversity, loss and uncertainty.  And I intend to finish it well, coming out on the other side whole and new, and thanking God for every moment.