Saying goodbye to someone you love is hard.
We all experience loss throughout our lives, sometimes it comes suddenly and other times we’ve seen it coming. Over the past year and a half, my family and I have had to say goodbye many times. In April of last year, my step-grandfather, Allen, passed away after a short illness. Then in November we lost Adam’s grandfather. In December, we had to have my fur baby of 12 years put to sleep. Then in March, my MeeMee left us to be with Jesus. Each one of those losses impacted me, and my family, in a tremendous way. Those people were so many different things to each of us. A grandmother, a mother, a sister, an aunt. A father, a friend, a grandfather, a brother. Although my Lexie was not a person, she was as much a part of our family as anyone else and had been my constant companion since I was a senior in high school.
Not having my MeeMee’s presence in my life has been especially difficult. The relationship that I had with her is one that I wish every girl could have with her grandmother and one that I will be forever grateful for. Since she lived 3 hours away in Savannah for the last few years, I visited when I could and we settled for frequent FaceTiming (which she said was “magic”) and phone calls. One of my favorite last memories of her is last October when she, mom, and Aunt Carol visited us in Columbia. We rolled her wheelchair out onto our back porch and wrapped her in a blanket so that she could watch us carve pumpkins. She said she’d never seen the inside of a pumpkin before!
The next day we took her to visit her sister and then bundled her up for a trip to the State Fair. She had a corn dog, marveled at all of the animals, and watched Hunter and I ride the swings. She was beaming, and so were we. A few weeks later she was in the hospital and was there until the day after Thanksgiving. We watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade on TV together in her hospital room. She was released the next day and spent the next four months being loved on and cared for full time by her two daughters the most compassionate Hospice nurses. My mom and aunt truly showed us all what unconditional love and servants’ hearts looked like over the course of those four months. They gave of themselves, physically and emotionally, with no limits.
I am thankful for God’s perfect timing in allowing me to spend her last week on earth with her. Since it was my Spring Break, I was able to sit by her bedside everyday and hear her say “I love you, Laa Laa” over and over, probably hundreds of times, that week. I was able to paint her nails one last time and help pick out that last absolute perfect outfit, complete with flamboyant accessories and shoes of course, that she would wear. We had time to think through details and pick out flowers in her favorite colors. Though it was all heartbreaking and incredibly hard, it made my heart so full to know that the celebration of her life would be just what she wanted and such a true reflection of such an incredible woman.
I left Savannah that Tuesday afternoon to come back to Columbia for my 3 month checkup appointment with my oncologist and to get my cast (from wrist surgery) removed. I’d planned to return on Friday as soon as the cast was off. A few hours after I got home Tuesday night, I got a call from my mom that she had begun to decline quickly, so I got in the car and headed back to Savannah. I remember praying throughout the 3 hour drive as I glanced back and forth at my GPS to see how many minutes were left. God, please wait 18 minutes before you take her. Give me 12 minutes. Don’t take her for 7 minutes. I threw my car in park and ran through the parking lot to the apartment, but my heart sank when I opened the door and saw my family. I knew she was gone. It was 12:35am, and she’d slipped away less than 10 minutes before I got there. I wasn’t there. If I just would’ve stayed earlier that day. If I hadn’t left to go back home for that appointment. If I had spent less time re-packing my bag that night and left ten minutes earlier. It was hard not to beat myself up over it, but ultimately I knew that I had to trust that God has His reasons and that it wasn’t in His plan for me to be there at that moment.
As I write, it’s painful to think back on that night and that week. It’s hard to accept that she’s gone and to go on without her. This weekend I watched the video that we showed at her funeral for the first time since her service. It’s saved on my desktop so I see it all the time, but I’ve avoided watching it for all these months because I knew how much it would hurt. And it did. I ugly cried all the way through it. But after it was over, I felt a sense of peace. I felt closer to her and I remembered just how blessed I am to have called her mine for 31 years.
The video started as a slideshow that my cousin put together for her surprise 90th birthday party a few years ago. We all worked together to sort through hundreds of photos and choose the perfect songs to add. For me, it is a wonderful reminder of all that she was. It reminds me of her perseverance and faith through adversity. As a young woman, she experienced the death of an infant son, injuries resulting from a traumatic car accident, and then the sudden death of her husband at 59. Each of these trials on its own would have been devastating, and she faced all of them during her lifetime. If you take the time to watch this glimpse of her 93 years, I hope you might be encouraged by her.
There are voids left in my life that each of these lost loved ones once filled.
There’s a sort of emptiness, an unbalanced, uneasiness that lingers. So many things about our lives have changed and routines that were so normal now are nonexistent. For Adam and I, there are no more Sunday dinners after church at Grandaddy’s house. For my mom and aunt, no more medicine to give or daily chats with the Hospice nurse. There are no more afternoon phone calls to my MeeMee. The list goes on and on and is different for each of us. There are those special parts of our day that didn’t seem very special at the time that we would give most anything to live just one more time.
It is almost impossible not to get discouraged and sad when we dwell on all that we’ve lost. We can easily get stuck thinking about memories we won’t have the chance to make. Though we miss our loved ones terribly, I think that living with these voids in our life reminds us that we can’t place our worth or identity in things of this world, including our families. We can love our people deeply, but we can’t allow our contentment to be dependent solely upon them. Our identity has to be found in Christ alone. Jesus has to be enough. Period. If He is, we can find hope even in the midst of loss and grief. We can trust that He will meet us where we are and help us to look at our lives from an eternal perspective and truly realize that we’re all only here for a brief moment.
In Christ we can rest in the assurance that goodbye is not forever and that one day we will be together again in heaven.
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:16-18