Grandma is home.

The last time I came home to see Grandma she had had an awful week.  Saturday morning when I came in to get her up she was coherent and bright eyed.  I woke Michael up with tears streaming down my face and said my grandma is here.

It was like God had flipped a switch. 

Later that day she said, “I keep thinking the Lord is going to take me, but I guess He has something else for me to do.” 

He used her until the end.

I had come to the conclusion I wanted to be there when she went home.  Michael had once told me that her death was not about me. A very thought provoking statement, and he was right. I wanted to witness the greatest moment of her life, when she would leave us and meet Jesus. 

Yesterday, we thought it would be in the next few days, but decided it wouldn’t be that night. 

But when mom called me at 6:15 this morning, I knew. 

Ten minutes earlier she had taken her last breath. She didn’t gasp for air like we had feared. She simply stopped breathing. Her heart stopped beating. The vessel that held my grandma had failed; as it will fail us all. 

I felt anxious that I had not been there. But I remembered how God had changed her condition when I came home to her last, I reflected on how He took her the morning of when I was to return home again. He didn’t want me to see. 

Praise God and His perfect provision.

As difficult as it is to imagine my life without her presence; celebrating my birthday without her card reading “Love you bigger”, graduating physical therapy school without her proudly watching, and building a family that will not know her, I know that this life is temporary. 

Knowing these truths doesn’t take away the pain. I know that my heart will ache for her absence; as it does so painfully now to see her empty chair, to hear the silence in place of the oxygen concentrator, a hum that had become reassuring. 

While my heart aches, my mouth will sing praises for her new life in heaven.

I will be quite honest though. I do not believe she will be watching over me. Maybe that brings some people comfort, but not me. God has prepared her a place in eternal glory with Him; a place that is beyond all our imagination. She will have no concerns or cares in the presence of our God, let alone concerns of this world. Our God is too big and too gracious and too loving to take us home to Him and leave us looking down on the world we left. She is completely satisfied.

And because heaven is a place that does not know time, I am already there with her. 

That last Saturday I sat at Grandma’s feet and, as I had countless times in my life, I asked her to tell me a story. Grandma had been mostly coherent, but some things weren’t making sense. When she started the story, I thought she thought this just happened. I was wrong.

This is the story she told me:

“The last thing I remember is the Newtown shooting. Twenty kids and six teachers died in the Newtown shooting. Twenty kids. They died. I can see a field of daffodils; a field full of them, blowing in the breeze. I can see the twenty children from the Newtown shooting playing in the field of daffodils. Jesus comes walking through the field and all the children run to sit at his feet. They listen as He tells them stories. Then the children start playing again and Jesus stands there and watches over them. 

I know that was a year ago, but I can see it as plain as day.”

Today, my grandma is in a field of daffodils with the two greatest loves of her life. 

 Praise God.