Grandma Gay was a unique person. She wasn’t good at everything she tried, but she wasn’t afraid to try anything. She was a life-long learner, taking classes at community colleges as long as she was able. Each morning, she picked a word out of the dictionary and used it in a sentence three times that day. She gave me my first bible, a beautiful light blue new testament that I still read. She gave me my first journal and made it very clear to me that she expected me to use it. I did. She tried to teach me how to knit and made me eat spaghetti squash. I never got the hang of either one. She was an artist, a little bit hard-headed about her opinions, and loved Oreos so much she didn’t want to share them. We have these things in common.
She influenced my life in many ways, but the most important thing she did for me was tell me the truth. She hid cookies from me, but she never lied to me. When I was a teenager, my family moved to a new town and I had to leave my first boyfriend behind. I was heartbroken. I spent a week in bed crying until I couldn’t cry any more, and then I just lay there feeling like my world could not go on. Grandma Gay was visiting at the time. She was present but not intrusive. She let me wallow in my sorrow without interfering. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. She knew I needed to grieve.
When I finally emerged from my bedroom, she talked to me about broken hearts. She didn’t gloss over my very real pain, tell me everything would be okay, or try to make me feel better. Instead, she told me her heart had broken when her husband died, and it still hurt. I asked her how she lived with that kind of pain. Her answer is one I have kept in my heart ever since.
She said we don’t stop loving someone just because they are gone. Over time, we just get used to them not being there. Each day it gets a little easier to live with the pain, as long as we don’t stay stuck on it. The wound on our heart eventually heals and becomes a scar, always there but no longer as painful. This is why, as soon as we can, we need to give our mind other things to focus on so our heart can begin to heal. I loved her for telling me the truth, even though it was a hard truth. Her words helped me go on living my life, moving forward one day at a time.
The past few weeks have brought a lot of sad news to my family and community. Friends and family received cancer diagnoses, and way too many young people have died accidentally or by their own hand. We need to talk about our grief, pray together, and be there for each other as we live through this pain. Most of all, we need to talk with our young people about it. Tell them the truth. Loss hurts, and it is not something we can avoid. There is no magic cure for the pain. The only thing that will make it better is living.