Signs of life

Sometimes I wish life had a slow-motion button.

A week after celebrating at my brother’s wedding, Grandma Polly suffered a massive stroke. Half her brain destroyed in a few minutes. I learned that my grandma was dying on a cell phone call while I was driving home from a bridesmaids luncheon for a wedding here in Nashville. And I couldn’t remember the last thing I said to her when I last saw her. I meant to tell her I loved her, but I can’t remember if I did or not. I meant to, but the ambiguity of it haunts me.

She was so vibrant and pretty that day, decked out in a new dress and wearing a beautiful corsage. I remember her that way, not the way she looked in her hospital bed this past week.

I was going to send her a card, knowing she’d like that, but I was waiting until all the August wedding craziness of my life was over. I thought I’d have time to wait.

This weekend I watched my mom become an orphan at 55. It hurts—sometimes sharp and sudden, sometimes dull and aching—to lose a parent (or grandparent) at any age. I tell my mom I love her in every conversation these days. Grandma was patient with us, giving us a week to get used to the idea that she was going to pass away, but sometimes it still feels like she was just taken right out of my life with no warning. I miss her.

I don’t know if I knew how much I loved her. I do now.

The day after she died, we picked up her belongings from the nursing home. Three boxes full of the signs of a life. We took them back to her house, left exactly the way it was the day she fell and broke her leg then entered the nursing home. It looked like a home waiting for someone to come back. It felt like Grandma ought to be there. It still smelled like her.

I helped unpack a box, lifting out her Bible and Open Windows devotional, a check mark on August 17, denoting she’d been in the Word the day she had that stroke. Underneath I found the not-yet-fully dried corsage from my brother’s wedding a week before and the August issue of the magazine I edit. I cried.

These next few weeks will involve sifting through the collections of a life lived to the fullest. It’s hard, and it’s going to hurt. But I know, even when there’s “pain in the offering, blessed be the name of the Lord.”