Why Does Grandma Have to Die?

 Different families have different cultures around death. My experience was very sterile: grandparents go into nursing homes or hospitals, maybe you get to visit them before they pass, maybe not (I was in Russia when my grandfather died), then you see them at the funeral home looking--not quite themselves. It's no criticism of my parents. Our family culture was ensuring privacy and dignity and letting the professionals take care of the unseemly stuff.

My children are having a different experience. Steve's mom has been living with us for four years and over that period of time my children have seen her less and less capable to the point where Steve was holding her up so my daughters could change her pants because she couldn't stand. She is expected to go home any hour now.

Yesterday, the hospice nurse told us that if we turned off the extra oxygen, she would be gone in ten minutes. Steve wanted his brother to get there, so the oxygen concentrator was still going strong all afternoon. We called our kids and by mid-afternoon all the kids except the college student were there along with our grandchildren. Grandma was in the room off the kitchen and kids were running up and downstairs playing and grownups were talking and making dinner and running errands and making phone calls to people in transit--all because Grandma was dying in the next room. 

My granddaughters, four and close to two, got to play with Grandma last summer. When the little girls came into her room, she perked up and poked at them and laughed with them. She did call my daughter who assisted her the most last summer by her great-granddaughter's name, but everyone was okay with that; we got it. When the four-year-old was told that Grandma was dying, she insisted, "I have to see Grandma! I need to ask her why she has to die."

Why does she have to die? Why did Jesus weep at Lazarus's grave? He knew He could raise him from the dead; He knew He was going to. Why did He weep? He wept because "the wages of sin is death." (Romans 6:23) Sin made us have to die; and the Lord of Life--"I am the way, the truth, and the life"--knew that death was wrong; that without sin in the world, Lazarus would never have to die, no one would ever have to die, and that included Him. There may be such a thing as a good death as the hospice nurse told us, but we were not made to die; we were meant to live forever in a perfect world.

My children, my grandchildren, and Steve and I, as well, are getting to see what dying means. We are having a change in our family culture: from home birth we have progressed to home death. Our older children got to see their younger siblings being born; our younger children got to see their grandmother die. Along the way, they learned that birth and death are not pretty or sterile; but they are both common to us all, hardships that we all go through. I hope they learn from these experiences that God can help them through every hard thing.

The Family: A Mini Body of Christ

 I was just sick for a month. It was probably the icky-c. Suffice it to say, I was down for the count. Not eating, not working, not thinking, sleeping six hours during the day. However, I had seven people in the household and they still needed to be managed. How was I going to do it? The answer: I didn't.

The Bible says in I Corinthians 12 that the church is the body of Christ, made up of a whole bunch of parts that all need each other to function. Each part does its part to take care of parts that need it and weak parts are just as necessary as strong parts. In these past weeks, I have seen how the Christian family can be a mini body of Christ. 

In Ephesians, the Bible says we are all to submit to one another. Wives are to submit to husbands as the church submits to Christ; husbands submit to wives by loving them to the point of death as Christ did for the church; children submit to their parents by obeying their parents in the Lord.

If we parents are in the Lord, what are we teaching our children? Of course, there are the verses in Deuteronomy 6:6-9 about teaching your children about the word of God at every moment of the day. In addition, having sifted through all the verses in Proverbs, I have found that we are to teach our children to 1)respect authority, and 2)work.

Our little body of Christ submitted to each other over these past weeks. I listened when my husband told me to go lie down. He did chores he never does--laundry and cooking dinner. The kids didn't complain about their regular kitchen chores and went the extra mile. The week I couldn't lead music in church, my twelve-year-old son led with the guitar and his sister home from her internship led singing.

What really warmed me and tore me apart in humility was the kids' spiritual leading. You may have heard of icky-c brain; I got it. I couldn't think. I would wake and pray and the only thing I could say was, "Jesus!" Speaking has been exhausting. Dad was still leading prayers in the evening, but in the morning, the kids took turn reading the Bible, leading our scripture memory and everyone prayed, a change from our practice of one child praying a day. They prayed when I couldn't. I wanted to, but I couldn't and all of them praying filled up my prayer cup when I couldn't pray for myself. 

For you moms and dads out there, this is what you see after twenty-nine years of teaching your children diligently. I was fortunate to see the fruit vividly. I didn't do it all; their dad told me what he wanted and helped when he was there; grandmas and grandpas put in their oar when we needed it; but above all, we filled our family up with the Bible so they knew what God wanted from us all and what He would give us: our own little segment of the body of Christ.

The Beast of Grief: Losing a Child

After over a year of not writing, I knew I had to write about Sarah. I talked the article through in my head and it went fine, but when I tried to write, it just wouldn't come. It was cold, awkward, disjointed. 

By the by, I have been having a hard time praying recently. Just really dry prayers. Then two nights ago, I finally just prayed--I lay on my stomach and prayed. I usually have just too many words going on in my head; I read other people's words with a constant ear for what is true and usable in my own work; I plan talks or articles. Too many words. 

Last night, I was going to try to get back to my clugey article on child loss after my church meeting. As I drove home, I suddenly didn't want to try to describe it--I wasn't having any success, anyway. I just thought, "Sarah!" And I suddenly began to moan. I moaned and sobbed with every movement of my breath in and out, unceasing sound. I had to keep my eyes open because I was driving seventy miles per hour, but for the first time, I cried with no words. 

I use words as my sword and shield and they have been the means of great healing. I truly believe--and know--that naming something takes away its power. But it has also buffered me from my emotions. After Steve got off the phone with the Tennessee state trooper who told him Sarah's car had run into the back of a parked truck on the interstate, Steve made a sound that I have never heard from him before or since, a sound of wordless, animal agony. I did that all the way home last night. When I stopped occasionally, I would think of words. I would get angry--just a flash--at their coldness and insufficiency--and the animal came back.

When I was in high school, we had a cabin in Indiana. On the first night of a visit, I went into my room to get my pajamas out of my drawer and a rain of little thumps hit my ear. I looked in the drawer and saw four little pink lumps, baby mice whose mother had made a nest in my pajamas. After running shrieking to my mom, she calmly suggested I dump the drawer outside, which I did. I was creeped out, but finally went to bed. As I lay there trying to fall asleep, I heard something I will never forget: the mother mouse crying for her babies. I killed them and she mourned. She just squeaked and cried for hours. A mouse in a mousetrap is a horror; but this one mother mouse was grieving and I felt with her. 

In all my losses of my children, words were a tool of healing and I've been grateful for them. When I gave up my daughter for adoption, I told the story to anyone who would listen for years and it was not until I wrote a memoir of it thirty-five years later that I really felt I had recovered. When I had my first miscarriage after baby #8, I spent an entire day writing letters to all my other children to work through the loss of that dream child. For a year-and-a-quarter, I have been talking and crying with dozens of people, including my husband and children who love her just as I do. But words really cannot express that raw, unnamable pain and for the first time time I resist them for how they buffer that emotion, trying to make it tidy and contained with this pain that is ragged and boundary-less, able to tear a hole in the sky--for what? For what? To reach her? I don't want to reach her. I have wanted to before. It just doesn't feel right to feel this way and want to reach into heaven to bring her back because I hurt when I know she's so happy there--and I do know this. I had a vision of her in heaven looking new and fresh, even though she was only twenty-two when she died. I don't want to reach her or bring her back; I just want to be allowed to feel this great dim mass of grief and the only place I could was alone driving down a dark highway without even the stars and moon looking on, just the beast of grief. I could see how alluring it might be to live with him, to feel so very much, a way of feeling for her, even if I can't feel her. I can't live there though. I have other children. How would that make them feel?

The beast will not overcome me; he will not win and rule my life. The words have come back and I can name him and contain him. He is there and I had to face him, to acknowledge him. I wanted to experience him to indulge myself. I needed to do that to recognize that he is there, that he could win if I let him. He will live with me for the rest of my life; I've seen him in the eyes of a woman who lost her first son to SIDS and all three of her next sons spent their first two years on sleep monitors. She was transformed from who she was before her son died--a wildly joyful young woman--into a woman who carried the beast of grief on her shoulders. There is a difference between him being in your pocket and him being on your back. As I discovered when I wrote my book on giving my daughter up for adoption, just because you don't feel the grief doesn't mean it's not there. Thirty-five years later, after all the talking I'd done, there were things I had forgotten, tentacles of grief that had gotten into the crevices of me that I hadn't explored. After Sarah died, I wanted there to be some reason for her death. I was so insistent that she had an appointment with God; she knew she did. She and her husband Caleb had been asking God what His plan was for them; God said, "You'll know it when you see it." I assured people that her death would be for God's glory; her sister Becki told us how often she said she wanted to die for God. I knew she was where she longed to be; my vision of her confirmed that. I was so bright and "godly" about her death. But the beast was still there. He will always be and I know how big and dark and consuming he can be. But, he is not all there is in my life. I will take him out of my pocket and squeeze him every now and then just to let him know I know he's there--no more secret explorations into my interior with those insidious tentacles. I will moan and cry like the bereaved mother mouse, wordless and nameless, and then I will pack him back in my pocket, button him up, and NAME him, describe him, dissect him so he will do me no lasting harm. And one day, I will be in heaven with her and will have no baggage, no pockets even for him to hide in. He will be left behind because he doesn't belong where "there is no dying or crying or pain."

My Book In Production!

 My first blog in a long time, isn't it? I have been busy. After our daughter Sarah died in a car accident during COVID, I was confronted with the opportunity to publish my book, Life In the Trenches: A Homeschooling Mom's Theory of Everything. It has been a busy year. Aside from the aftermath of Sarah's death, I have been editing and re-editing my book and it will be out by the end of November if not before. I'll let you know when it is out!

What is a homeschooling Mom's theory of everything? Whenever you have to make a decision about what to choose or how to live your life, you simply ask yourself, "What does the Bible say?" In my book are the answers to many of those questions about what the Bible says about your relationship with God, your relationship with your husband, how to organize your home, how to discipline your children, why to teach different school subjects, why knowledge of nature and science are important to you children and how to give them a vision for purity. My prayer for the book is that it will help families to not only be delightful homeschools but will bring all of their members closer to God.