The Natural Course

Today I saw one of the saddest, yet most beautiful things I have ever witnessed. My grandmother recently had a stoke and is in the nursing home dying. We are all dying, given that we begin to die the moment we are born. However, she is considerably closer to that end of the spectrum than I believe myself to be. On the other hand, I could go tomorrow. At any rate, my mom holds on to the hope that she is going to get better and go home. My mom fights to keep her here and she is ready to go home to her Lord. My mom sits and stares at her the whole time we are there and scarcely takes her eyes off her. My grandmother looks right back at her, as if to say "let me go." I am not upset about the condition of my grandmother because she has let go of this life and is ready to give up "the good fight." The only thing that upsets me is to see how deeply it affects my mom. My grandmother has been trying to tell my mom the whole time she has been there that she is never going to get better. She says I am old and I am not getting any better. Today my mom said to her, "you have to stop getting up on your own and falling or you will never get any better," and her reply was simply, "so." My grandmother expresses no interest in leaving the nursing home, of reading, watching tv, listening to music, playing on the computer, or knitting, which are all things she used to enjoy. To me that is the surest sign that you are not long for here: when there is nothing left that you want to do.
I will miss my grandmother when she passes away but I have a real peace about it. She is saved and is at peace about dying. For instance, my grandmother has periods of rebounding and then worsening again, and on one of her bad days, one in which she wasn't very lucid, she looked at my mom and me and said, "I'm slipping back again, and ya'll are worried, but I'm just enjoying it." Knowing that she isn't afraid and that she is going to heaven makes it all okay for me. "Wouldn't you be happy for your friend if she were going to Hawaii? Heaven is a whole lot better than Hawaii." I love to be around my grandmother right now. It's like she is not completely in this world, and that part of her is already in the other world. It makes me feel like she knows a lot of answers that I do not yet know. I am just thankful to have this experience because I know that it will give me a foundation for letting going of my parents when the time comes.
Death is a part of life. It's the natural course of things. If you live to be twenty years old and your grandparents are still alive, consider yourself lucky. If you yourself live to be at least seventy, consider yourself lucky. The Bible gives us seventy years to live, which means anything on top of that is bonus. We live only to die in the end, making it a part of life. To me, that is not sad. What is sad is people who are dying to live rather than living to die. Life is precious and fragile and short, so truly live yours. Allow yourself to have the experience of truly being alive. You think life is hard and not worth the living? Go spend about ten minutes walking through a nusing home, and you'll learn to appreciate it and to complain a little less. Being that close to death allows you to see life more clearly.