Tuesday, November 9, 2021

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.

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

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.