In Memory of Frances

My grandmother went home last Tuesday night. She doesn't live in Magnolia Estates anymore and of that, I'm sure she is very glad. She doesn't need her oxygen anymore. When we were trying to talk to Grace about it, she said, "Grandma's oxygen make her better." "Yes," we replied, "yes it did." But it wasn't the oxygen and it wasn't the thousands of pills and doctor's visits she's had over the past so many years since she began to get sick, it was the Lord himself that finally healed Grandma last Tuesday. Now she is whole, now she is perfectly who she was created to be. And I am overjoyed because of all this.

But I am really sad at the same time because my grandma is gone. She won't ever sit and drink coffee with us on Sunday afternoon again or tell us stories of how she and Daddy Fred met. She won't ever have us slip her wine into the assisted living home or laugh so contagiously here again. I loved her hands so much. She had one crooked thumb from an automobile accident and that made her hands so prominent. Her eyes were beautiful and they sparkled with quiet determination. She loved everyone around her more and gave of herself more freely than anyone, except for my own mother (her daughter), I have ever known. During the last two days of her life, everyone from the man who owns the assisted living home where she lived for the past two years to the cooks and cleaning ladies came by her room to tell her goodbye and that they loved her. My grandma was a woman who poured out the love of Christ. And now she knows it fully. What was mortal is swallowed up in life.

"And, Lord, Haste the day when my faith shall be sight..."