Grace

Grace to Grieve: Part Two

/ Renee / 1 Comment

Part 2 

Christmas Eve 2021

In the shop at the farm is a wooden desk that runs nearly from one end to the other. In the middle of the desk is grandpa’s drawer. In the drawer are the farm account books, or at least that’s where they were when I was small and he would stand over my shoulder and teach income and expenses, balance, and numbers. His work fingers pointed to small lines and figures that, at the time, meant nothing more than afternoons in his chair in front of a propane space heater bellowing warm air at my shins. While grandpa and uncle Marty worked on winter maintenance tasks I balanced the farm checkbook. The shop filled with the smell of tractor oil and propane gas from the heater. When gramps unplugged it to let the temperature level off the sound of WOBL golden oldies country music and his hum along to songs that were familiar and distant filled the shop air. 

He taped pictures in his drawer. School pictures of my brother and me chronologizing our lives up to graduation through thin scraps of tape attaching them to the sides. His great grandchildren’s school pictures were accruing along the sides now. Atop the tool bench desk is a host of work tools, scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, receipts, notepads with reminder scribbles, screws, nails, rubber washers, and other assortments of everything the local Farm and Home hardware arranges in neat rows. 

Gramps could be found on early summer days, when the rain gently sloped from the edges of the shop and draped along the freshly planted fields transforming them from waves of brown soil to velvet buds of green, in front of his drawer in his black, swivel chair with his Bible open on his lap. When he’s not working his boots are stored under his chair, and slung over the back of it is his black, carhartt vest. 

…

I can not just drive by the shop. A force compels me into the gravel drive and to the front of the building where my life from behind me unfolds, a blossoming of every moment that has led to this one, dismantling my heart and unraveling me into a pool of snot and tears. My boots crunch the gravel to the door. It’s cold inside. I duck under the torn apart Massey, a winter project waiting for him to come home. His boots are under his chair. His vest slung on the back. I collapse into his chair so hard it retreats from the force of my heartache and I swivel on the concrete. Burying my face into his smell, I grip the front of his vest with both hands, and break the silence of the shop with a wailing like that of a wild and anguished animal. 

November 25, 2021

    Thanksgiving has frequented my top favorite holidays since I was a little girl. Mom made an afternoon with us of bringing the china down, washing and polishing the silver, cutting up cubes of cheese for trays spilling with pickles and olives. Thanksgiving morning greeted Luke and me with the smell of apples and cinnamon simmering on the stove. We watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade while helping mom set the table with the fancy dishes that we only used one day a year.  “Your aunt Evy collected these one at a time,” mom would say, setting them in place. The dishes were pearl white china with silver rings haloing acorns tucked into delicate pine branches in the center. 

“These ones are mine,” my brother held one up to his face. 

“Not until you’re older,” mom reminded him, setting it carefully back in place. 

“You can have these ones,” I say. “I get grandma’s.” 

In grandma’s kitchen, grandpa built her a glass cupboard that hung from the ceiling above the dishwasher counter. She stored her china set, that our aunt Belle saved enough once or twice a year to order an additional piece until the set was full, in her glass cupboards. The light from the window above the sink caused them to gleam and bounce light fractures about her kitchen in the early morning hours. Her china was clear glass and each dish was framed in round, glass bubbles.

We had a mutual understanding, Luke and I. I got grandma’s china. He got grandma’s house. I got mom’s house. He got mom’s china. The day that we would be divvying up china and houses existed only as some distant, future realm, that didn’t really exist to us as children, and merely manifested in the occasional night lying awake in our beds weeping the small child’s cry over the fear that one day we would face a life that was filled with the absence of our grandparents and parents. 

Death was not something unfamiliar to us as children growing up on a farm. One of my earliest memories as a child includes butchering hogs. Grandpa had a small pistol he’d use to kill the animal by firing directly into its temple, and uncle Marty would slit its throat in one tug across its neck. It would spend the next hour or so draining blood into a five gallon bucket. Luke and I took turns carrying the bucket behind the barn to dump. Once the animal was drained we’d hang it, dip it in boiling water, shave it, commence to halving it, pull the intestines until there was nothing but bacon, ham, and pork chops to wrap and hand over to the Russians. This group of men, who drove out to Camden township from East Cleveland, sat on the tailgate of their ford rangers and watched us butcher, drinking vodka from handled jugs, with AK’s slung across their backs. 

    The first Thanksgiving without grandma uprooted our tradition from mom’s living room to grandma’s dining room.We usually spent this holiday with my dad’s side of the family, sort of as an annual reunion. They understood that since we lost grandma in October, mom was not prepared to host Thanksgiving separate from her dad and brother. The morning of Thanksgiving 2020 my husband smoked our turkey, a tradition we’d started two years ago, in year six of our marriage. Macy’s hosted no Thanksgiving Day parade to watch as we blended sweet potatoes and rolled croissants. In the afternoon we transported it all to grandpa’s house. We ate the next two Thanksgiving dinners on grandma’s porch telling stories about her and holidays past. 

Thanksgiving 2021 was the first holiday we’d achieved some small measure of normal as a family. We missed grandma terribly, and will until we’re reunited with her in Heaven, but we were able to tell stories with laughter, reference her and not drip with sorrow. The kids wrote the history of the first Thanksgiving into a play for us to enact for grandpa and uncle Marty. They sat in grandma’s ivory parlor chairs just outside the dining room clapping as we took turns emerging from behind a curtain that had the Mayflower roughly hand painted onto it. Finally we took final bows and retreated to the dining room for dessert. 

“I think I’m skipping out on pie,” uncle Marty said. Excusing himself into the living room to settle into grandpa’s reclining chair. 

“Are you feeling okay?” I follow him. 

My uncle was two years older than my mom. Born during the Kipton train crash and blizzard of 1960. There were so many injured in the Oberlin hospital my grandma had delivered him on a stretcher in a supply closet. “There was nowhere for us to go,” grandma always held both hands up in a ‘what are ya’ gonna do’ gesture when she told the story. “There was no medicine back then anyway,” she’d say. “So we just did what we had to do.” 

Two summers ago uncle Marty’s gallbladder had burst. Since then he’d had troubles keeping certain things down, other things gave him a significant amount of pain digesting. He leaned his head back against the headrest. 

“I don’t know, pumpkin,” he said. “All of a sudden I just got this sharp pain.” 

“Do you need a glass of water?” I ask.

“No, no, I’m alright, I’ve got some.” He said, shaking his head. 

November 27, 2021

There is always a difference in the voice of my mother when there is something not quite okay, and things may be terribly not okay, but her voice doesn’t reveal that much, only enough to forgo masking the truth that everything is not all okay. 

“Uncle Marty tested positive for covid this morning,” she says. 

“Oh God, oh no.” 

It had been one of our collective, greatest concerns: dad, Marty, or grandpa testing positive. They all had multiple preexisting conditions: dad and grandpa both had asthma, grandpa had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a decade earlier, and was 84. Marty was diabetic and didn’t have a gallbladder. After two years watching covid attack the placentas of women I loved who birthed stillborn babies as a result, and experiencing it attack the weakest and most vulnerable places in my body a year prior I felt my stomach twist and flip upside down. My fingers tightened their grip on the phone pressed against my cheek. 

“How’s he feeling?” I asked.

“Not too bad,” she said, her voice lighter from the release of the news she called to share.

“That’s good,” I say. 

“Yeah, we’ll keep an eye on it,” she paused, “just pray honey.” 

My throat thickens and my eyes sting. 

“I will.” I tell her. 

December 3, 2021

Dad started showing symptoms next. Mom said he was barely able to leave his chair after work. Somehow, just as he’s done all his life, he was rising at 3:50am, and leaving for work at 4:30. Arriving home at 3, and not leaving his chair until his alarm at 3:50. 

“I’m not sure that he’s even eaten much,” mom tells me. 

It is late, my kids are in bed. I look at my husband, frightened, with my phone pressed to my ear.

“What’s wrong?” He whispers.

I say into the phone, “I’m taking soup to grandpa and Marty tomorrow, I’ll make extra for dad.” 

“Thank you, honey.” She says. 

I tell my husband after hanging up that my dad has covid, and that he’s not doing well. 

“Oh no,” he says. “And he has asthma.” 

“I know.” I say. 

December 4, 2021

In the late afternoon I set out to deliver dinner to grandpa, uncle Marty, and dad. Grandpa tested positive a few days after Marty did, but he was feeling alright, he said, just tired. When I walked into the kitchen with their chicken soup Grandpa was sitting at the table bent over a plate of pancakes in his yellow, flannel button up. 

“Hi, gramps,” I smiled. 

“Hey, honey,” he put his fork down. 

Marty was sitting in the chair across from him. 

“I brought soup,” I tell them. 

“Soup sounds good,” Marty clapped his hands together. He was not eating pancakes, just sitting in his chair talking with gramps. 

“Good,” I say, uplifted by how normal everything seemed. 

“How are you feeling?” I ask grandpa. 

 “Just tired,” he says, “not too bad otherwise.” He patted his chest.

“Thank God,” I say. 

I calculate that if it were going to be a bad case it would have gotten worse by now, right? I ask myself. Definitely. I think. I was feeling like shrapnel within twelve hours when I tested positive. They were up and eating, and looked for all intents and purposes, normal. I ladle Marty out a bowl of soup. After chatting with them a few more minutes, I kiss gramps goodbye on the cheek, and tell him I love him. 

“Love you too,” he tells me. 

When I get to my parents’ house my dad is in his chair in the living room. A rerun of MASH is playing on their box television set. His feet, still in his boots, are wrapped in a blanket. His hands tucked into a hand towel. His face is turned away from me. He doesn’t stir when I come in. 

“Dad?” 

No response. 

“Dad,” I call louder. 

He is pale even in the dark, and I can’t discern the rise or fall of his chest. I’m frozen. Afraid to move closer. 

When I was a little girl, my mom would play a Disney Sing Along VHS video, and one of the songs, amidst “It’s a small world,” and “Country Bears,” was “Grim Grinning Ghosts.” As the musical number unfolds various Disney villains appear and dance throughout the song. I was always perilously frightened by that part of the tape. I would run behind the couch and yell for my dad to save me. He’d charge into the room and scoop me up, “daddy’s got you” he’d say, and he would wrap me up in his strong arms and pretend to battle the villains on the screen with an imaginary pirate sword to my utter delight. 

“Dad,” I nearly yell, begging him to respond. My throat is thick and I feel a cold sweat start to form along my spine. 

Finally, after three to four painstaking seconds more he turns his head weakly toward me. 

“Hi, sweetheart,” he manages to say, opening his eyes. 

“I brought you soup,” I say. 

“Thank you,” he yawns, “I’m not really hungry.” 

“I know, but you need to eat,” I tell him. 

“I’m just really, very tired. You know I worked all week.” 

It’s Sunday night. He hasn’t moved from this position in this chair since Friday when he came home.

“I know. Dad. You have to take off work.” I plead with him. “You have to rest.” 

“I haven’t taken a sick day in fifteen years.” 

“So, you’re overdue,” I say. “Please, promise me, at least through Wednesday. Please stay home.”

“I think if I can just sleep I’ll feel a lot better.”

“You will,” I say, “the fatigue is one of the worst parts, but you have to stay home to rest. Please stay home tomorrow.” 

“I’d do anything for you,” he says, his eyes close. 

“I know you would, dad,” I tell him, “please stay home. For me.” I add. 

“I’ll stay home tomorrow,” he finally concedes. 

“Promise?” 

“I promise,” he says. 

He’s already nodding back off to sleep. I kiss his cheek and tell him I’ve left soup in a bowl on the table. Driving away I pray it won’t be the last time I talk to my dad. 

Driving past my grandparents, their familiar presence and the immediate after sting of grandma’s absence adds to the turmoil in my heart. I begin to pray. I struggled in my walk with the Lord after losing grandma. It was so slow and so painful losing her. Each day, though I felt I was sinking beneath waves of worry, grief, and anger I knew the ground beneath my feet was solid. I knew that the joy within me was not a result of my circumstances, but a result of who I was in Christ. Even though I believed my sin was nailed to the cross, that I was eternally redeemed, still, I struggled to pray. But, parked once again in my weeping spot at the church where I first learned of salvation, I brought all my laments, and laid them at the feet of my God, because despite how abandoned and alone I felt, I know how much He cares for me. 

December 6, 2021

 I teach English at Lorain County Community College and every Tuesday and Thursday morning mom comes to get my girls at 11:45 so that I can get to my class on time. One day, I’ll resume my writing career, but teaching writing is a regular reminder of my first passion. This is finals week, and since my students submit an essay, we spend the final two hours eating Christmas treats and debriefing the semester behind us. It’s one of my favorite days of the year. I was finishing getting dressed when my phone rang. 

“Hi, honey,” mom said. 

“Hi, mama,” I reply. 

“Honey,” she clears her throat, “I’m so sorry to tell you this, but I’m not going to be able to make it this morning.”

I sit down on the bed, one leg tucked into my nylons, the other bare against our flannel quilt.

“He’s really gone downhill.” She tells me. “This morning his blood oxygen was 77, we’re on our way to the hospital.”

I learned, because of covid, that a blood oxygen level of 93 was low. 77 was dire. 

“Oh, God,” I say.

“I know.” She says

I can still vividly see her in the navy GMC, grandma’s final car, driving her to chemo. I can still see Gram reclining back in the passenger seat trying to hide her fear from us as we run along the drive waving, pretending to smile, wishing her a safe trip, and praying this appointment would go well. I see her face drawn in worry over the effects of that day’s treatment. Right now mom was driving toward the same hospital grandma never came home from. 

“Okay, that’s okay,” I tell her. 

“I’m so sorry about your class.” 

“No, don’t be, just please get him where he needs to be,” I tell her. My words catch in my throat betraying the panic bubbling up from a place already frenzied with grief inside me. 

“I will. Love you.”

“Love you too.” 

I unravel on the phone to my director. Between sobs I manage to tell her that my dad, my uncle, and my grandpa had all been fighting covid, that none of them were doing well, and my mom, who usually picks up my kids, was unable to today because of the covid and the blood oxygen levels and I’m nearly hyperventilating when she tells me to calm down. 

“I know your faith is strong,” she tells me. 

I did not feel strong. 

“Thank you,” I say. 

“And you know that when David fought Goliath, all he walked into that battle with was a stone and the faith that God would win it.”

“That’s right,” I agree. 

“Give this battle over to God. He’s the only one that can win it.” 

“Thank you,” I tell her. 

December 12, 2022

My dad began showing signs of improvement. He took off Monday from work after I’d begged him the night before. I’d asked him to take until Wednesday, but he said one day was enough, and he hadn’t wanted to even do that. 

“I promised you, baby.” He said to me later. “I’d do anything for you.”

Though I was annoyed he hadn’t taken more time off he said he woke up Tuesday and felt like going in. We were later told that, had he sat in his chair for the duration,  pneumonia would have settled into his lungs. If pneumonia had seized his asthmatic lungs, it could have been fatal. As long as he could stand it, it was best he was up and moving around. Though, it took months for him to appear back to normal.

My uncle, however, rapidly declined. I continued running food, vitamins, checking blood oxygen levels for my dad and uncle at home while mom sat with grandpa in the ICU. She was allowed two hours in the afternoon with him. He’d been placed on a ventilator, and had just completed five days of remdezeever. It was his blood oxygen they weren’t able to stabilize. It was holding a steady 93-94 on the ventilator but as soon as he came off it plummeted to the low 80’s. Covid patients show a certain level of covid numbers in the blood. If a treatment is effective the numbers of covid in the blood decline. After the first five day treatment the ICU doctors determined his levels hadn’t shown the improvement they hoped for. So they scheduled him for another five day round to start the next day. 

After hanging up the phone from a call with mom my heart feels heavy. I rub my temples with my fingertips. My three daughters are running back and forth between their bedrooms in our ranch style house past me to the living room. Their noise behind me blends into the static I feel filling my brain. It had been eight days since I’d seen my mom. We’d connected between texts and calls but each conversation was strained with the angst of another day passing that gramps wasn’t back in the garage, over Luke’s shoulder, working on the Massey. One of our farm tractors needed a new top end and the head replaced. He and Luke had just gotten it torn apart in the shop when, while walking from the shop to the house, gramps realized he couldn’t catch his breath. Luke had come alongside him, helping him get to the porch steps. Gramps sat down on a step, looked up at Luke, and said, “I’m in trouble.”  

Luke called to see if we had an extra humidifier. When he came to get it he was frantic in a way I’ve never seen. We were all becoming feral with worry. Every noise, every phone call, every text vibrate scattered our nerves and a wet, cold weight of worry brought us to shivering trembles if we were idle too long. As far as Luke and I knew, grandpa and the farm were a synonymous force. We were as wrapped up in our need for him as the ground was desperate for rain mid July. On late spring days, when the crops are all in, Gramps sits at his bench with his Bible in his lap just watching heaven rain on the newly budding soil. His presence there is as sure as the sun rising. It’s as certain as the seasons. It’s not something we’ve ever seriously considered losing. Not yet. Not like this.

My brother’s wife, Amber, and I set to researching homeopathic treatments that first night. We started a hydrogen peroxide therapy in cool mist humidifiers in gramps and Marty’s rooms. Luke and mom went to pick up pig ivermectin from a family friend who had a family member who took it and got better when they had covid. My best friend messaged me saying it was what helped her dad when he was sick with covid. Grandpa and Marty started taking it right away. It seemed to help initially. We had a blood oxygen reader because a member of our church who had just recovered from covid, drove it to us and left it on the porch when my dad first started showing symptoms. It read 77 on gramps the morning mom took him to the hospital after failing to catch his breath from walking to the house from the shop. 

“Honey,” my husband’s voice snaps me out of trying to examine every detail of the last eight days. My brain was frantically searching for any signs of hope and coming up empty. He moves across the kitchen to stand beside me and puts his fingers on top of mine, still pressing into my temples. He takes my fingers gently away from the sides of my head. 

“What did she say?” He asks. 

“It didn’t work,” my voice breaks loudly. 

“Mommy,” our oldest, always listening, “mommy, what’s wrong?” 

I don’t have any way to answer her. Everything. Everything is wrong. 

December 17, 2022

When I was a little girl my uncle had a video camera, one of those huge ones that propped up on your shoulder. My first Halloween that I was big enough to trick or treat, I’d just turned one in July, my mom drew a Jack o’ lantern face on an orange trash bag, and cut head and arm holes. There’s a video tape somewhere, buried in one of the empty bedrooms, of me coming to the door. My grandparents excitedly opened it with baskets full of candy to pour into my plastic, Sparkle grocery store candy bag, and pretended to be the most scared of me ever. I said “boo,” and they feigned shock and horror to my absolute delight. 

***

“Marty is not good.” Mom’s voice is tired. 

She has called for what has become our daily  “drive-home-from-the-hospital” update. 

“What does he need?” 

I can’t help but feel desperate. Why wasn’t God healing my family? Weren’t we faithful enough? I know that God’s love and sovereignty doesn’t work this way. I know He’s working all this for our good, but we’ve been through enough. A seed of frustration and anger takes root in my heart. We’d given zinc, vitamin D, elderberry, a hydrogen peroxide cool mist humidifier was running 24/7, he’d continued taking the pig ivermectin converted for a human ratio. Still, he had steadily declined. He hasn’t moved from his bed for four days, and his phone has been dead for all of them. Mom is sure it’s because he knows he’s going to die. I can’t even call him to check in. I have to go in a few times a day to make sure he’s breathing. 

“There’s nothing you can do,” mom said. 

“How’s grandpa?” I ask.

“He’s doing pretty good.” 

Grandpa had two more days of the second five day round of remdezeveer. His blood oxygen had been holding steady at 93-94 with the ventilator. But the forced air to his lungs was beginning to take a toll. The pleura, or the double layer of membranes that surrounds the lungs was beginning to dry up. Essentially, this double layer, the parietal (the outer layer) and the visceral (or inner) has liquid between that allows the outer and inner layer to slide along one another during respiration. This layer of liquid was beginning to dry up compromising his respiratory cycle. 

The day before the start of this second round I received a Facebook message from a friend who had just buried her brother as a result of covid. “Whatever you do,” the message began, “do not let them give your loved one Remdezeveer. It leads to kidney and liver failure, ultimately all his organs will shut down, and you’ll lose him.” 

I thanked her and offered my condolences. Then I called my mom. Mom assured me that the doctors were monitoring his kidneys, his liver, and that they were aware of the effects some covid patients had experienced because of the treatment. They weren’t worried about it being an issue. It was as variable as the effects of covid from one patient to another, they said. I hung up and prayed that grandpa wouldn’t be one of the patients that we shouldn’t have let them treat with Remdezeveer. 

Dec. 22, 2021

Marty began to slowly recover. Dad still needed help with some meals, some things weren’t tasting like he was used to, some foods were making him sick. Marty having any appetite at all gave us relief. Grandpa was able to withstand longer and longer periods of time without the ventilator and his blood oxygen was 88 this afternoon after he’d been off the machine for a few hours. He’d sat up in a chair that he’d walked to on his own, next to mom, and ate a full meal, she said. When I talked to her we both cried with relief. Friday morning he should be able to move to one of the assisted care facilities prepared to wean him off the oxygen, before coming home. We were in a waiting game, and he’d go where a bed opened, but based on the progress of some of the other patients there we were hopeful he’d get to move out of the ICU in just a few days. 

Dec. 24, 2021

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I run. It’s a way to manage the anxiety I bear, a side effect of a 2014 PTSD diagnosis, and allows me a healthy means to manage my stress levels. I usually run anywhere from three to four miles. My run is peppier this morning. It’s Christmas Eve, grandpa is coming home soon, and Marty and dad are well into recovery. My family is still bleeding from the gouge grandma left, but the blessing of these healings will allow us to continue mending as we adjust to her absence. We’re a small family. My mom and dad married and I and then my brother were born, my uncle never married. The wound of the loss of a loved one is never insignificant, but when our every day consisted of one another it felt more like a hooked spear gouging us on the way in and ripping what was left on the way out. 

While I’m running my music and pace are interrupted by a text from my mom. Excited to learn when gramps is leaving the hospital I pause my run to read it.

Gramps has gone down hill. 

It’s up to you if you want to be here. 

I understand if you don’t. 

All of my thoughts stop. Before I know it I’m running from where the treadmill is in the basement, up to the shower. Shove on boots, jeans, flannel, still dripping water and hurry to my keys, “I have to go,” I choke words out to my husband passing him one way or the other. He holds me at the door. “Be careful.”  

I am as careful as I can be wailing into my steering wheel, peering out the windshield into an uncharacteristically warm Christmas Eve morning. 

The afternoon I drove to my grandparents’ after my grandma died was a beautiful, fall day. It seemed surreal to be shrouded in gray cloud grief when the world was aflame with a fall pallet of sunlit beauty all around me. The beauty of Ohio falls are a result of death. The beautiful colors and robust trees bearing thick red, orange, and yellow leaves are engaged in a process of dying. 

The words of old familiar hymns speak lyrical truth to my soul through my car speakers and aid and abet my grief stricken wailing. I’m reminded of King David pleading on behalf of his sick and dying son as I beg God to heal my grandpa. “Not like this,” I just keep saying, loudly pleading to the heavens beyond the roof of my car. “Please,” I cry, “not like this.” 

Fisher Titus hospital maternity ward and ICU floors share a wing and I park in a spot near the glass window covered first floor and hurry to the doors I’d waddled through twice to deliver our oldest and youngest daughter. Our middle daughter was born during our sojourn of ten years to Ashland county. Twice I walked into these doors for what would become the happiest memories of my life. I approach the building and levitate through the sliding doors. It felt like the glass window walls were shattering around me as those memories became fractured with the reflection of this one. 

My mom, uncle, and brother were seated in chairs near the elevator, away from the doors. My brother’s head was in his hands and from across the room I could see Marty crying. Mom seemed to be the only one holding it together. She stood up and hugged me. Internally, I was begging for her to say it had been a false alarm, that we were going to go sing some Christmas carols to him and head home. But, I knew. I knew by the fall of my brother’s shoulders, that he was too far beneath the surface to even look up at me, by the tissues my uncle, -still barely functioning, himself- who had driven here by himself when he should have been home resting, the tissues he was holding were drenched and well used. I knew by the deep breath mom released once I was seated next to my brother, on the blue, nearly plastic, waiting room loveseat and she was settled back into her blue, nearly plastic hospital waiting room chair. 

Over the course of the last 12 hours his organs had started failing. He was in complete liver failure, the kidneys were shutting down, and his lungs had dried to the point they’d never function on their own again.

I watch my mother’s mouth move to form and say these words.

 But, I am on the living room couch playing peek-a-boo over the back with my grandpa. He’d come with a box of Mike and Ike’s for me, and peeked over at me, waking me from nap time, smiling, and rattling them to get my attention. I am in his shop, in the winter, with the space heater warm on my legs while he hums a bluegrass hymn from beneath a tractor behind me. I am across a checkerboard from him, losing, he tells me where to move my next piece. I am in the driver seat of a dump truck, he’s pointing at the clutch and the break, “now, just let up real easy,” he says. I am beside him in our back row pew of Camden Baptist Church. I am walking with him in the cemetery, placing flags at veterans’ graves for Memorial Day, he is pointing at the graves of our family and neighbors, sharing their histories with me. I am in a tractor waving to him from across a field. I am on a softball field, and he is in the bleachers. 

I am on a blue plastic couch, in a hospital waiting room. 

“Either way he has, at best, two to three more days.” 

I gasp and cover my mouth. Luke, who had sat up beside me, crumples back into his hands. 

“I couldn’t make the decision alone,” she says. “But if he moves to end of life care we can all go be with him.” 

As an ICU patient only mom could be with him. I realize she’s saying if we move him to die, we can see him, and if we don’t, he’ll die anyway and we won’t get to see him. 

Mom and Marty go up the elevator together to sign the papers moving his room. Luke and I pace from the couch where, like small children we had taken turns crying into each other, to near the windows to call our spouses and update them. We each stood with one arm holding up a phone and the other around each other. It felt like if we let go we might fall off the edge of the earth. We were no longer right side up. 

Then we are in his room gathered around his ICU bed. Some of the hours I held his hand. Some Luke did, some Marty did, some mom did. We read from his Bible. It was one of the first things mom brought here three weeks ago for him. We sang hymns. There was joy in our grief. We knew as soon as he was absent from the body he would be present with the Lord. We knew that by grace he had been saved, through faith, and that he would open his eyes in paradise. Still, it was one of the worst days of our lives. The nurses appeared as apparitions meddling with his tubes, the beeps, and the heavy pulse in-and-out of the ventilator near his bed. 

Six hours later I am following behind my brother driving home. The sky mirrors our grief, paralleling the snuffing out of the sun, and looms ahead and behind us. 

I can not just drive past the shop. Compelled by agony I turn into the empty farm; it felt like dwelling among bones to be idle here. The earth bleeds flowing rivers of bitter water, they crash into my feet, dragging me toward the shop across decades of pebble, scattered moments rattling around my memory. I crash into his chair in front of his drawer, as a generation erodes beneath me, and Luke and I are propelled into roles the farm has laid in wait for us.

***

Once home, Travis draws me a warm bath. I can’t stop the shaking. He makes me hot cocoa. It is Christmas Eve and my children are small. But, even though the grief that has filled me could melt my bones, I don’t have to feign joy for them. On the car ride home, staring up at the gray sky, what I cried out to God caught me by surprise. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I repeated through my tears. Thank you for his life, thank you for giving us to him, thank you for bringing him home, thank you for the cross, thank you we’ll see him again. I used to lay awake at night and cry about this very moment. A world where our grandparents have lived and died. Then, when I was little, this day seemed as impossible as making the days between the years of my birthday pass quicker so that I could finally be old enough to drive a tractor on my own, then old enough to get my own car, then to leave for college, then to get married. I wanted to race through the days I thought would never end only to end up wishing I could experience just a moment from some of them one more time. You never see the end coming. One day I picked our oldest up to carry her on my hip for the last time. One day I nursed my last baby for the last time. One day their cries for me in the night stopped. I didn’t know they were the last time, but they were all the same. 

The memories with the people of our farm who instilled their love of God and country into us through the labor of their hands and by the sweat of their backs gave me fragments to cling to in moments of despair, glimmers that kept the faintest light burning in the darkest places. My husband’s skin smell and the warm caress of his hands along the skin of my back added to my pieces of hope. His beard, rough and forgiving, against the side of my neck when he wraps me in his arms and I let the heavy stresses I’ve bound inside me go in an exhale and return his embrace. The cries for mama in the depths of midnight and the stuttered breaths of our children as babies when I would pluck them from their bassinets, and nestle the crown of their head within the base of my neck, rocking them in the silence, sending prayers of gratitude to the God who gave them to me, these brought my life full circle and are those which will, even when I am old and at the edge of this temporal world, sustain me on toward the prize of Heaven. I will remember the smell of the truck cab and the newborn milky aroma of twilight motherhood. I will hear Gramps’ hum “The Old Rugged Cross,” deep from his chest, the same hum that he soothed me, my brother, and his great-grand babies with to sleep, nestled safely in his hands. I will embody the hope and faith my grandmother never lost in me and bequeath this to my children. I will see the velvet buds of soybeans shimmering brilliant green, the color of Travis’ eyes, decorating the rich brown soil in a ballet led by the wind as conductor, bending and commanding the bow of their leaves in an orchestra of majesty. 

***

 I used to think that Gramps’ blood must have dirt in it for how much time he spent out in the fields. 

“Faith and this land. Trust in God and this land has held this family together for eight generations.”

His voice is loud, over the rumble of the tractor engine. He is a deep brown, sun shade, in the middle of summer with a trucker hat on. We are driving toward the farm. Acres sprawl before us and gulls scatter at the roar of the engine. 

“Faith in God and this land.” He says.

Then he stands up while the tractor is still moving, and trades me spots on the fender so I can drive it the rest of the way back.

Grace to Grieve

/ Renee / 4 Comments

Part 1

In August 2020 my grandma was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. She agreed to see a doctor only after the tumor growing on the outside of her left breast began to seep a toxic infection from numerous enlarged pores. She’d hidden it for nearly eight months as it grew, but once it began to smell, she knew her secret wouldn’t be kept for much longer. 

The tumor was twenty nine inches long. Nineteen inches across. Twelve inches deep. It was covered in a honeycomb of black infected pores. They performed a biopsy to see where else it had spread in her body. She was prescribed an antibiotic for the infection and a pill to start shrinking the tumor. 

It was too large to remove and had to be shrunk first. The cavity left behind in her body, they said, could be fatal. 

At the next appointment the biopsy results showed the tumor was cancerous, but it hadn’t spread. It was clustered in one area on her body and was very treatable. They recommended a non-traditional chemo treatment that targeted the zone of cancer, rather than radiating through her body. It would only target the cancerous cells, shrink the tumor, and make it operable. They were hopeful that by Christmas, she’d be on the road to recovery. But, her Medicare insurance denied the request for this treatment deeming it “unnecessary.” Rather than consulting with her for alternative options, she was treated with a traditional form of chemo, the stretch of radiation from which would be experienced throughout her whole body. The absence of information regarding this modification pillaged her consent in the matter. 

After three weeks of chemo Mondays, three weeks of daily pill treatments, the tumor had shrunk from twenty nine inches long to nineteen. From nineteen inches across to eleven. From twelve inches deep to nine. The infection had cleared and the black and purple oozing pores had shrunk, the rotten liquid dried up in response to the antibiotic. Her body was responding “positively,” to the treatment her cancer doctor told us.

But the chemo treatments were making her sick. She went for treatment on Monday. Tuesday she was so exhausted she didn’t get around to eating much. Wednesdays were better, but her appetite was marginal, at best. Thursdays and Fridays were her best days. The nauseating effects of the chemo had worn off, the angst of the upcoming treatment was out of arm’s reach, but by Saturday it was close enough to grasp at with her fingertips and so the nausea set in through Sunday as she anxiously pondered Monday morning’s appointment. 

A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, in November of 2019, she fell on an icy sidewalk outside of a print shop where she was picking up notebooks with handwritten sentiments to incorporate as part of ‘thank you’ baskets for the renters to the farm. At Thanksgiving her wrist was wrapped in a brace she still had from a previous injury. Her spirits were high regardless. With plates dusted from the remnants of pie scattered about the table we taught her and grandpa how to play Keys To The Castle, a board game we’d picked up in Niagara on the Lake, Canada. The trauma to her body triggered the growth of a tumor that, she confessed later, she had originally discovered as a small lump in December of 2012. 

The tumor robbed her body of its eighty one years of resources. It fed on her flesh and withered away her rosy cheeks until they hung from sharp, peaked bone. The following summer, in mid July sunlight, as we sat by the pond in her backyard, I thought the breeze may not be gentle enough to keep from tearing the thin veil. 

Her body had already sacrificed itself to grow this parasite. It had thrown all its eggs into one basket, an expression she often used. In doing so, after three weeks of chemo, her reserves were depleted. Unable to manifest the physical capability to endure week four, the treatment was waylaid for a week in order for her to gather her strength the following week. 

She went on week five and came home too weak to rise from her bed. The cancer treatments were put off until she could regain enough strength to withstand them. 

In the next two weeks that followed mom started each day with a single cheerio that grandma nibbled. Some days it settled. Other days it didn’t. In the afternoon a spoon full of rice or a bite of oatmeal. One of the effects of her treatment was constipation. Fearing too much build up in her system, and already enduring searing pain slicing through her abdomen, she timidly nibbled at bites but couldn’t eat much more than a single swallow. 

Week eight I simmered beef bones with onions and carrots for 36 hours. Carefully, I strained the golden and oak brown liquid into cans to bring to her kitchen and prayed that it would provide her with the nutrients to sit up, and eat a spoonful of cheerios the next morning.

Inside her house the busyness of idle waiting was fraying the edges of everyone’s wits. She was sitting in her cancer chair. An addition to the living room furniture that she’d requested. It had a remote control lift to help her stand up. Beside her chair, a new end table that grandpa built at her request stood taller than the others, and was easier for her to reach. On the end table is a mug of ice water. I had bought her the mug at the start of this journey. It said “survivor,” and was decorated in pink ribbons. I sat on the floor in front of her and talked with her for several minutes until she appeared weary. 

The distance between her house and mine was not enough to weep all that was inside me out and I didn’t want to upset my children by bringing my tears home. Our church’s building was rebuilt down the road from her house after it was struck by lightning. It now stood between hers and mine. I pulled into the familiar drive recalling all the Sunday’s I sat beside her in the back row. I pulled into one of the spots near the building and curled up into the fetal position in my driver’s seat and wept.

    It wasn’t long before her chair with the lift and custom end table surrendered her to a hospice bed that was temporarily set up in her living room. Week nine I sat at her bedside with my mom holding onto her leg. Patting it as if that may bring her comfort. 

Losing someone sharpens memory in both a cruel and merciful way. I remembered things holding her bony shin that I hadn’t thought of in years. More recently the afternoon that my daughters had painted her toenails so that she would feel pretty at chemo floated through my brain. It had been just a few weeks earlier. The giggles they emitted as they transformed her toes to bright pink and purple etched laugh lines into the walls all around us. Decades of Christmas Eve laughter carved  memories filled with matching pajamas and one-liner t-shirts in between the planks and wallpaper strips. A small town magician came and performed magic once in this living room to the wonderment of my then tiny daughters. It was my birthday. 

It was all coming to an end. Each breath was tortured, and every so often she would emit a pained moan. In desperation I convinced her to try medical marijuana about a month prior to this. She had agreed, and seemed to be looking forward to having something to eat. But, when she was just a signature away at the appointment, the attending nurse told her it may make her feel “loopy.” Rather than coming home with an appetite she came home with only her resilience and the hope that maybe tomorrow she’d be able to keep something down. 

Drinking, dancing, any manner of compromise of virtue was against the rules of her upbringing. “We were good baptists,” she’d say “Baptists didn’t do those things,” always laughing, waving her hand at the folly of it. All through the chemo, all through all that pain, she only took one half of one acetaminophen. 

    My mom bore the majority of grandma’s caretaking. She fed her, bathed her, drove her, and was there beside me holding my other hand while I cried as quietly as I could, so as to not disturb my grandma. My uncle called earlier that morning to ask if the CBD gummies that I take for anxiety would help her appetite. I injected a tone of misplaced anger toward him and said that the prescription would have helped. I said I didn’t think these would help and mom didn’t think she was strong enough to chew them. He called a local CBD store to find an oil or another sort of dissolvable form so that she could drink it, or absorb it under her tongue. 

In the meantime I melted the gummies I had in a pot on her stove. Afternoons eating tomato soup and grilled cheese with her burned in my throat while I stirred the melty, gummy liquid. 

    In a cup of warm water I dissolved less than a teaspoon. The gummies were peach rings. I hoped it would give the warm water a peach tea flavor and taste pleasant, while also providing her some relief. I sat beside my mom as she spooned her mom tiny sips, one, two, and that was enough for that moment. I sat, still patting her bony shin. I hoped that my touch would bring her some small measure of comfort. The silence in the room was broken only by the ticking of her clocks. So many seconds asynchronously ticking past. One grandfather clock whose chime hadn’t sounded in years was the only piece frozen at some distant point in time. 

***

I like to picture the moment the grandfather clock froze, capturing the relief my great aunt Belle’s children must have felt when she returned from gathering eggs one morning during a particularly arduous winter storm. The barns out back were hog barns when I was a child, but when my grandpa was a child, they’d been chicken barns. The farm survived the depression pedaling eggs and milk to the surrounding cities of Lorain and Elyria. When my grandpa was a young man, my mom would accompany him dropping eggs off on porches where, in exchange, the residents would place coins under the glass bottoms of emptied milk jugs. 

The farm is located in the flatlands, the plains of northeastern Ohio, along the corn belt of the midwest. I imagine they call it the corn belt because from an aerial perspective of the nation, it probably looks like North America wears a belt of corn around its middle, largely due to this region. The landscape allows for breathtaking, “as far as the eye can see” sunsets, rolling clouds, and plenty of time to see a thunderstorm march in from miles across a field. However, during the winter months, the snow storm winds that assault the farm can be as relentless as they are brutal in their accost pushing mounds of snow drifts, that during this storm in particular, came to be some as high as twenty feet. On a winter morning, a century prior, my aunt Belle found herself lost in the middle of this snow storm, not 100 yards from the house, but just as hopeless as if she’d been dropped into Oz out of Kansas. 

***

“Let’s see how that settles,” mom said. 

Grandma nodded and slowly settled back onto her pillows. She closed her eyes. I prayed that the tiny amount of pain relief she may feel would be tangible. That she wouldn’t get nauseous, and in a few minutes she’d sit up, declare how good that made her feel, and ask me to make her chocolate chip cookies. I asked mom where the broth was. 

“I could warm some,” I offer.

Mom shook her head. 

“It was just too rich for her system,” mom said sadly.

Later, at home, I canned the rest and stored it out on one of the shelves in our homestead pantry in the garage. 

    We sat in silence a few minutes more before grandma started to rustle uncomfortably. “I’m going to be sick,” she said. 

She tried pushing herself up toward sitting, but mom rested a hand on her shoulder, “you’ve got to try to keep it down mom,” she said gently.

“Don’t you think I want to?” Grandma rested back against her pillows once more. “Don’t you think I’d love to eat something.” 

She didn’t open her eyes the whole time. Mom began talking about just one bite and then another, that we’d get some of her strength back, that this was just the first step. 

“Lynn,” grandma interrupted her, “just stop talking.” 

We sat in silence for a few more moments. 

“It didn’t work,” she said, “I don’t feel any better.” 

    When I was a little girl I spent lots of farming days at grandma’s house with her. We’d make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or tomato soup and grilled cheeses. Then we’d make food for all the farmers and drive around to all the spots they were driving with the tillers or the planter, the sprayer or in the combine if it was Harvest. As I got older I started fitting the ground with the tillers and grandma would bring me sandwiches.

She drove a black Chrysler, by far the fanciest vehicle on the farm, with leather seats and suede interior. No matter the field condition, around five o’clock, she came bouncing along the headland in her Chrysler with ham and cheese sandwiches. She had a career in administration at Oberlin College so lots of those days she’d worked all day too. Then she came home to make sandwiches for us. 

    She bought the Chrysler because on one of those sandwich delivering days, when I was no more than five or six, the car she drove before she got the black Chrysler wouldn’t start in the driveway of my parents’ house. So, we ended up walking the field between my parents’ house and hers. It’s less than half a mile distance, but in a field nonetheless. We’d only gone a little way and I decided I just didn’t want to walk it anymore. So she carried me. 

    Every fall, even when we were homeschooled grandma took my brother and me shopping for school clothes. We’d load up the registers with new jeans, shoes, coats, whatever we saw that we liked. Then we’d go to Bob Evans. She continued buying our clothes all my life. When I had kids she bought them their clothes too. We’d all pile in one of the vehicles and while the majority of the shopping was for them, she’d tell me, “but, you get something nice for yourself too.” 

    Grandma had a particularity about cleanliness. She was always washing our hands. Anytime we came out of the bathroom, hands still wet from just washing them, she’d guide us to the sink in the kitchen and have us wash them again. The “germies” she called them. We had to wash away the germies. 

On one of my shopping days with her as a child she bought me a tiny diamond ring. On the way home we stopped at Sterks, a local breakfast diner in Wakeman, for lunch. She shepherded me to the bathroom to wash my hands. While she was scrubbing my fingers the ring slipped off and dink, dink, dinked down the drain. We both stood there for a moment until I let out an open mouth wail as she stared in shock down the black hole that had just swallowed up my prize. She lamented that day for the rest of her life, always recalling the day she lost my ring. 

    Once grandma retired she spent a significant amount of time driving us around places. When my brother went to middle school she picked him up every day. The middle school was about twenty five minutes from the farm. Grandma was never late. She was early by a margin of quarters of hours, but she was never late. 

When she was a little girl, attending the church across the street from the farm she’d one day marry into, she would wait on the steps of the church for her parents to pick her up after the youth activities, never on time. She swore in those moments she’d never make her children wait on her. 

“I was always the last one there.” Grandma had a way of huffing without making an actual sound, “and I used to watch Belle, and Lenny, over in the house, and I didn’t know who they were. I had no idea I’d marry that boy in the farmhouse with the windows all lit up across the way. I just sat on the steps and thought I’d never make my kids wait on me.” 

But, one of the afternoons she was preparing to pick up my brother, Gramps asked her to follow behind him to a field north of her destination, him in the water truck, her following behind, so she could drive him back to the farm where he’d then collect the planter to return and start working in the field. Grandpa confirmed he’d never seen her drive so fast between the field and the farm on that trip back. Then, he said, she shot out of the drive and down the road toward the school. After she died, we were around the table in the dining room at her house sharing these stories, “like a bat out of hell,” grandpa said.

What my brother described witnessing, as he emerged from the school not seeing grandma parked in her usual spot, is nothing less than Dukes of Hazzard worthy. He had just stepped out onto the brick steps of the middle school when the nose of her black Chrysler speed racer style careened around the side of the school and screeched to a halt in front of the step for him to climb in.

***

Aunt Belle realized too late that the snow had moved in as she was collecting eggs. When she opened the door to the hatchery she was met with the unmerciful brutality of a Nor-Easter snow storm. Mounds had already piled, covering her tracks from the house. Certain she could maintain a steady direction she willed herself from the threshold of the door and plunged deeply into the heavy snow. She had only made it a few feet before realizing that she may be veering off course. Frantic, she spun around, only to find that her tracks from the barn were already swept away. She was an island amidst a torrential onslaught of nature, determined to swallow her whole in its rage. 

I don’t know what Belle must have been thinking. In telling the story to her kids, to my grandpa and great-aunt and uncle, she recalled, I just prayed that with each step I was walking closer to home. When I knocked into the railing at the back of the house, and knew I’d made it, I’ve never been more thankful to God. He led me home. 

I imagine that this is what waking up in Heaven will feel like. As we reflect on the journey of this life and look back over all the doubt and fear, one thing will be clear. It was by the grace of God we were led home and what joy will be waiting there to greet us. I imagine Jane and Ron, Belle’s kids, running to hug her despite her snow covered and shivering state. I imagine that we will run to the arms of Jesus and he will embrace us, and welcome us home. There is little more painful in this life than laying a loved one to rest. But, there will be no greater joy than being reunited with them in Heaven.

***

    There is little more painful in this life than laying a loved one to rest. I would even reason that the degree to which that pain exists depends on the manner, time, and perceived understandability of the death. I’ve lost loved ones unexpectedly. In an instant they’re gone which, for me, has been hard to reconcile. The pain of losing someone whose death was ‘expected’ is by no means less painful, however time can be a cushion. Time seeing a loved one suffering, time reconciling with their last days, time to say the things needing to be said make saying a final goodbye more reconcilable, though the pain is by no means less, the manner of stages through a process of recovery are expedited. 

Week ten the CBD oils were ready to pick up. My oldest daughter had a soccer game in the afternoon near the store. After her game my husband parked our F150 in front of the clean, glass doors. Earlier that morning we’d stopped in to pick up an envelope of cash from my uncle. Grandpa was sitting beside grandma in the living room. I walked to her hospice bed and put a hand on my grandpa’s shoulder. He put his hand on top of mine and gave it a squeeze.

“Hi, grandma,” I smiled for her.

“Hi, honey.” 

She was able to look up at me. 

“I’m going to go for your medicine after Rae’s game.” 

She nodded.

“I’ll be back, okay? I love you.”

She gave me a weak smile. Grandpa got up from his chair at her side to walk me out. 

“How’s she doing today?” I asked, peering over his shoulder to the living room. He shrugged, and gestured a “so-so” with his hand. 

In the CBD store, the lady managing the counter rings up the items my uncle ordered. I hand her the envelope of money. “Chronic pain is difficult to manage, especially at the end of life.” She says to me, counting the bills. 

“Oh, it’s not the end of life,” I tell her. 

She smiles at me as though I may be the saddest thing she’s seen all day. She hands me a white bag and tells me how to administer the various medicines. 

“I added a few samples,” she says, “for you.” 

Back at my grandparents I go straight to her bedside. Grandpa is still there sitting beside her. “How was the game?” He asks. I don’t remember what I told him. I hold up the white bag. 

“I have your medicine,” I say. 

Her eyes search for me.

“Thank you, honey.” 

She reaches for my hand. Taking it I tell her it’s going to help her feel better. That it wasn’t the same stuff as the peach water that didn’t help. She squeezes my hand. 

“I tried honey, her voice is just above a whisper, “I’m sorry.” 

I squeeze her hand. The hospice bed was set up in her living room with the green carpet, where the Christmas tree goes

It had been my suggestion to send her to chemo. Only a few months prior we’d sat in the same living room, she and I. 

“I just don’t want to miserably waste away,” she’d said. 

“These are going to help.”

I hand the white bag to my grandpa, still holding her hand. She doesn’t answer. 

“I’ll be back to see you, okay?” I couldn’t keep my throat from pinching off these words.

“I love you, honey.” She repeats. “Goodbye.” 

“I’ll see you soon,” I tell her. But I can’t keep tears from falling as I bend down to kiss her on the head before turning to go. Grandpa walks me out to the backroom, and pats me on the back as I leave. 

Eleven days later my grandpa and I stand in this same place in front of the mirror above the sink in their laundry room. In this room are the cupboards he’d built to store farm clothes, the washer and dryer, the back room shower he’d installed for us to use after days in the sun power-washing hog manure out from beneath crates of piglets, where our boots went so as to not track the stink into grandma’s kitchen. Family hadn’t arrived from the cemetery yet. We, my brother, and mom stand alone in this room. The reserves of each of our memories finds grandma busying about in the kitchen behind us, pulling cookies from the oven.

“Hello, hello,” she’d say. “Come in,” with her arms outstretched to embrace us. 

She was a worrier. Anxious always. Tormented by the news. The injustices of the world. She had a deep vein for justice. 

His arm held my shoulder tightly. We had watched her starve to death over a period of 11 weeks after the chemo had stolen all that was left from a body that had used all its reserves to grow a tumor the size of a toddler. She died on a Saturday, after three nights in the hospital, with grandpa by her side. He called mom after she’d drawn her final breath.

“I need a ride,” he told her. 

Mom picked up my uncle and they drove together into a night containing the whole presence of grandma’s life as though she’d been absorbed into the constellations and they were merely existing beneath her as they’d always done. Her two children, now motherless, and still not without her presence. 

***

“I’m just ready to go home,” she’d told me. She was referencing Heaven. It was August outside. We’d celebrated her 81st birthday just days before mom told me about the tumor. Her first appointment was in a few weeks. 

“The doctors may be able to give you something to help you feel better,” I pleaded with her. “You could get a medical marijuana card and it would help your appetite.” 

“That would be nice,” she said. 

Grandma loved lemon meringue pie. She had full access to the food she loved and no capacity for it. 

“I’d love to see them grow up,” she gestured to my children outside in her pond. They were splashing happily with my mom.

“I never got to rock Rylan and Eli,” she said sadly. 

“You can,” I tell her. “We’ll get your strength back and you can rock them for naps for years.”

My youngest and her cousin were only three weeks apart, both nearly one now, both born on the heels of her fall. She didn’t feel strong enough to hold them as newborns, the injury to her wrist prevented her from cuddling them. Grandma rocked my older two babies to sleep all through their infancy when they were at her house. I’d come to pick them up from afternoons with her and they’d be snuggled in, sleeping soundly atop her oversized bosom. 

When discussing treatment her wish was to die gracefully, quietly, at home. It was her last offering of herself for us: to fight for herself the way she had always fought for all of us. 

“I’ll go for you guys,” she had said.

Grace is given here.

/ Renee / 1 Comment

In our home patience doesn’t run rampant. It is a conscious and practiced effort. A daily dying to ourselves, adorning the fruit of patience, and seeking the Holy Spirit to temper our flare ups. My husband and I are growing three small soldiers, three warriors to add to the army of God -and we view it this way- as if we are preparing them for battle. To demonstrate impatience toward them robs us of demonstrating “the righteousness of God,” to them, which James tells us, “the wrath of man does not produce (1:20).”

Nothing quite upsets my nerves like knowing I have a large order in the bakery to fill. The first icing attempt, the first cookie dough ball, the first cupcake batter measured into one of twelve meticulously arranged cupcake liners, and my hand is nearly always shaking. When I told my mom I was starting a small business, and that I was going to use the farm’s resources to bake professionally for our community, she stared at me for a moment before genuinely asking, “why?”

As much as I love to bake, and as much as I feel called to this particular ministry it disagrees with my personality in a number of ways. The interaction that this particular industry requires is not one that I tend to participate in naturally. I’m an introvert by nature requiring moments of solitude before the Father to recharge my social battery. Interacting at catering’s, making small talk, and functioning effectively in highly socialized settings are not my forte. I also consider one smudged line, one unevenly baked pastry, one crooked icing flower as a failure to the whole endeavor, resulting in a manic tossing the whole project, and starting over. If I can’t deliver perfection why even try?

So, naturally, as I’m dotting the center of icing flowers or writing meticulously atop royally iced sugar cookies and my toddler runs franticly into the kitchen lineman style tackling my shins, causing my writing to streak a colored line from one end of the pan to the other, my flesh desires wrath. It desires justice. It desires repentance from the underserved tackling and unannounced destruction of my project. It demands retribution and affirms I am the victim of an egregious wrong goading me into what is rightfully mine: the shattering of my porcelain temper.

And I have failed in the pursuit of the spirit to lead my flesh in too many like moments. I’ve yelled and I’ve cried. I’ve frantically lost my head, spinning in circles to throw towels on the flooded floor of the guest bathroom where the sink -that one of my children left plugged -was left with the water running. I have failed to demonstrate the holiness and righteousness of God to my children when I have yielded to wrath.

But, grace is given here. In these moments of flesh led failure the Father affirms his righteous holiness to me through the conviction of my anger. I seek my children. I ask for their forgiveness. The conviction of the Holy Spirit leads me to teach them that “the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” In every instance where my thermometer is brought to new heights I have a choice: pursue my own unrighteous indignation or pursue His righteousness through the fruit of patience.

Were it not for the grace of God there would be no such overcoming. Were it not for the grace given to me on the cross through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection there would be no such redemption from the sin separating us at birth from the very holy presence of God.

In these moments the spirit leads me to remembering that grace is given here. I can’t deliver perfection. Even as a believer, a born again new creation as Paul defines in 2 Corinthians 5:17 my sin struggle still rears its ugly head every day. Every day is an overcoming. It’s tiring, and at times can seem to be impossible. But, grace was given to me so that I have victory over sin and death. Victory that has already, “overcome the world (John 16:33).” I have a choice in moments where my flesh rages against my spirit: I can appropriate the victory, resisting the devil and causing him to flee (James 4:7) or I can yield to my flesh in these moments, forfeiting the righteous pursuit of Christ’s character, which I should be in constant pursuit of growth toward His likeness (Eph. 4:15).

Ultimately, present salvation from the temptation to sin is mine, but I rob myself of the benefit of growing into the likeness of Christ when I yield to the flesh, rather than appropriating the victory I have in Christ. He’s given me victory over my impatience and futile pursuit of perfection. He’s given me victory over fear, doubt, social anxiety, illness, and even death.

I’m reminded daily, by my own shortcomings, that God does not call the equipped. Rather, he equips the called. In doing so, therefore, he removes any doubt, that there may be no confusion as to who gets the glory. In Him is the grace to even be part of bearing testimony to His name; being given the opportunity to grow more into Christ’s likeness every day is grace. It is unmerited, miraculous, awesome grace.