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.