“It is so happy to love.”

written for my grandmother

“She had the feeling that somehow, in the very far-off places, perhaps even in far-off ages, there would be a meaning found to all sorrow and an answer too fair and wonderful to be as yet understood.” ― Hannah Hurnard, Hinds Feet on High Places

I am sitting here, watching my grandmother sleep, listening to her shallow breaths and the occasional snore. She is so peaceful, even now, as cancer ravages her body.

She has just months, maybe only weeks to live, yet lives each day as she always has—walking with her Jesus. But their conversations are even more intimate now, like old friends, as this disease brings her to her knees (literally) and at the feet of her God.

I sit and watch this woman, and listen to her words, even wise and articulate in and out of consciousness. I’ve barely known her, she is my father’s mother, but my father hasn’t been a father and so, she too has been distant from my life. I’ve visited with her only a handful of times due to the tumult of divorce and inconvenient geography. And yet there is no regret now. Only blessing and joy that I am able to spend this time with her, simple as it may be.

I’ve come to watch over her tonight as her regular caretaker is unavailable. She asks me to read Hind’s Feet in High Places to her, and I hesitate at the intimacy of this act. I read and am swept up in words as she drifts away and together we envision the fields of anemones speaking in color and the sounds of the babbling streams singing their songs. And as Much-Afraid meets her newest traveling companions, Sorrow and Suffering, Grandmother murmurs knowingly. They are her constant companions now too.

Even with the limited time I’ve spent with her, I have always seen Christ in her. But now He has been made even more visible, as if I can see Him through her thin, pale, almost transparent skin. And I hear His voice over her weakened one. And I see His light in her dimming eyes.

I look at this shell of a woman in a failing and broken body, yet she is whole and she is His. And I read until she falls asleep and until I am broken.