Impossible and inevitable
This past summer, my family of six made the trek across Kansas and down through the Ozark hills to visit my family in Missouri. In a surprising quirk and grace of timing, our long-planned visit occurred only days after my book, Ancient and New, had released. This meant that I was there when my parents’ and grandpa’s copies arrived on their doorsteps. It also gave me the opportunity to share it with two women who I write about in my book: my grandmothers.
I tucked my book under my arm as my mom and I walked into the doors of my Grandma Capps’s memory care facility. We found her sitting in a sunny room at the end of the secured hallway with a row of windows along two walls. It’s often hard to tell whether she remembers me because my mom, always the encourager, tries to give her as many hints as possible: “Well, hi there, Joan. Look who I have with me today! It’s your oldest granddaughter Danielle here visiting from Colorado!” Grandma replies, “Oh, yes…”, her nod and her gaze sometimes more comprehending than others, but always with a soft smile.
We held hands as she asked the same three or four questions with genuine curiosity each time. I glanced at the other two residents in the sunroom, bent over in their wheelchairs, silent, uncomprehending, staring blankly out the window, just as my grandma had likely been doing before our arrival. ‘Just like the day before,’ I thought to myself, ‘and just like tomorrow.’ My insides twisted in protest at the cruelty of Death, so brutal in its suddenness and so tortuous in its delay.
“And yet each of them are held securely in your love, Jesus, even now,” I prayed silently. “Oh, help us, help us,” I begged, willing myself not to cry, “right here in the middle of all the things we do not understand.”
I took a deep breath and said more cheerily than I felt, “Grandma, I brought something I think you’re going to like. It’s a book that I wrote.” She turned it over in her hands.
“Danielle Mellema,” she sounded out, syllable by syllable, as her fingers traced my name. I listened to her voice as she slowly read the first sentence of the blurb on the back cover.
“You know, there’s a story about you in here,” I said with a smile. Her eye brows raised in surprise. “Yes,” I continued, “in the very last chapter. It’s a story about longing to be at home with God.”
She closed her eyes. “Yes. I do want to be with God.”
I squeezed her hand. “I understand that feeling, Grandma. He is with you while you wait.”
Later that day, my family and I drove out to the cemetery next to the old country church where my Grandma Allen is buried alongside friends and family and generations of the saints. She died only a few weeks after my publisher invited me to write my book. Wanting to share the news in person instead of over the phone, I had planned to tell her all about it during my visit just a month later. But it was not to be. My mom told Grandma about the book while she was in the hospital in those final days before she went to be with the Lord. Mom reported that when she gold her, Grandma replied, “Well, I always knew she would.”
Grandma always did dearly love being proved right about the people she loved.
While my kids ambled along the path toward the nearly 200-year-old church with Matt and my dad, I stood at Grandma’s grave with Grandpa and Mom by my side, gripping my book to my chest.
“I don’t think I can do it,” I confessed, voice already quavering.
“Well, now, that’s all right. Take your time,” Grandpa said. Mom passed me a tissue.
I turned to the page I had marked in the book and read aloud my own words:
On the day I said my final "I love you" to my grandmother until that day we will be reunited in the presence of Jesus, we received a card in the mail. My breath caught as I recognized Grandma's perfect flowing penmanship. Though her sickness limited her in many ways, she was faithful to send a card for every birthday, holiday, and celebration of any kind. I imagine she has written hundreds—maybe even thousands—of cards to her loved ones over the years.
The envelope was addressed to Matt, but I opened it myself with trembling fingers. In it was a card sent in celebration of the publication of his first book, which was released into the world that day. I ran my fingers over her written message, as I realized with wonder and gratitude and profound grief that this was the last card we would ever receive from her, and more—almost certainly the last card she would ever write.
I flipped back to the front of the card. In gold letters it read, "This is just the beginning." She passed away the next day.
Beginnings and endings.
Life and death.
The ancients were not afraid to tell the truth about death. They identified death as the insidious unwelcome guest of God's perfect Creation, and yet also held the triumphant belief that death was merely a door into life for those who belong to the Resurrected Christ, and that one day it would be defeated forever. We can see this paradox in the letters of St. Paul to the early Church: "The last enemy to be destroyed is death," and "For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain."
The seeming contradictions of life and death are brought together and transformed in the scarred hands of Jesus, the same hands that neatly folded and laid aside His grave clothes before He burst forth from the tomb in resurrection life.
In this world we live in the tension of these astonishing, agonizing pairings. Holding joy and sadness, loss and hope in the same breath is our constant reality, even as we believe that sorrow, tears, and grief will give way to joy, laughter, and restoration of the years the locusts have eaten. Though we are ever mourning and rejoicing now, it will not always be so.
…
Right now, these seemingly opposing realities feel like unreasonable pairings. But in the full light of Morning, holding these things together will no longer fill us with soul-rending tension, but instead will fill our hearts with a sense of possibility, glory, and peace. With renewed sight, we'll behold the One, both fully human and fully divine, who was there holding them together all along.
A few weeks after our time in Missouri, our seven-year-old was plunking out a tune of his own making on our piano. He paused, stood up, and came to sit next to me on the couch and asked, “Mom, where did we get the music stand next to the piano?”
I told him it had belonged to his Great-Great-Aunt Marie who passed away a few years ago. Following the trail of his many questions, for the next 10 minutes I shared memories about Aunt Marie, my Grandpa Capps, Great-Uncle Jim, Grandma Allen, Matt’s Grandpa Sid, and his Grandma Betty and Grandpa Bob, all of whom are now at home with the Lord.
My son heaved a great sigh and leaned over to put his arms around my waist. “Mom, I just wish I could know every person you’ve ever loved.”
My heart broke at his tender, impossible wish, the grief of these last several years and their steady stream of loss of beloved family and treasured friends washing over me.
“Sweetie, I wish that too.”
And yet even as the waves of sadness rolled, from a place deeper and truer and more enduring than grief, hope flooded in, warm and radiant and untroubled by my sorrow.
I added, “And someday, when Jesus makes everything new, you will.”
Impossible and inevitable.
Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud
By John Donne
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.