It was an incomplete love and then before I knew it, I lost him. I can’t fathom the loss of a relative, let alone the one that I’ve most trusted since my birth. My grandfather was a soldier; a soldier of life and love. His happiness seemed to be in the slightest cracks in the sidewalks or in the smallest drop of rain. His measurement of love in life was very different from mine. His walk was unique. He walked with the stride of a thousand men. In his younger age he could drive a car faster than his eyes could see and in his golden years he could hold onto a cane with authority. His eyes were like emeralds outshining even the brightest of stars. Out of all of that uniqueness, he was no different from anyone else when he died. He said encouraging words from his death bed and sent his love to us before his passing, but in the end it’s all the same, we die. There’s nothing glorious about dying. Sure we get to meet our Maker, but in human nature, dying is not pleasant. Knowing that my grandfather’s body was now converted into a basic lifeless shell, my heart became cold.
My soul is wondering. Each rhythm that life brings I don’t want to be a spectator of it, nor do I want to participate. I’m hardened and no one can bring me out of the wondering willow that is me. I miss the breeze. It’s been so long since I’ve actually stopped to feel the breeze on my face or in my hair. I stepped outside right after my grandfather went into never-ending coma, and I felt nothing. The clouds no longer brought me joy. The rattling of the leaves on trees no longer sang a naturalistic song to me. I couldn’t see the creativeness that God presented to me in His infinite painting that is this world. Death has brought no closure to my grandfather’s ending, yet from his death I should try to find a peace about life. Where is the flaw? Why can’t I be happy knowing he is in a better place? Perhaps because I wish I could enjoy it with him, how selfish am I?
I’m still wondering. I walked farther and farther out in the miles of fields in front of my grandfather’s home and just kept walking. I saw a big maple tree with a massive trunk and I sat underneath it. I didn’t care about its branches or how it probably held thousands of gallons of water within it, I just wanted to sit beneath it and cry. Life as I knew it was shifting. Forever was I changed by this man and now, what to do? His story is done, but never forgotten by me.
Complete darkness. I found myself running in complete darkness, and then I woke up. Birds might have been chirping outside, but that didn’t matter. What day it was, didn’t matter. As far as I understood, I was in a different reality. I took my legs and threw them to the side of my bed and my feet touched the chilled wooden floor of my bedroom. Then as I felt a chill run through my body for the first time in days, a sensation of sadness overcame me and I froze. I realized that today was the day that a measurement of six feet meant the difference between surface and a hole in the ground.
I looked in the vertical mirror in my room and stared at myself in black velvet. My mom came into the room and suggested that I wear pearls to the funeral, but I refused. I figured what was the use in looking dolled up when I feel like the world has tumbled around me. I walked down the stairs and out the door into our Oldsmobile. I slammed the door shut and we left to the burial site.
Everyone at the funeral hugged and loved on one another, but I didn’t care much. I approached the hole that they were carrying the casket to and I looked deeply into what seemed like an abyss. I was angry. I did not think that my grandfather should be shifted into a chasm that was never ending. I began to sob uncontrollably. My mother came and consoled me. She grabbed me and we gradually walked away from the site. We walked all the way back down the hill towards the car. I sat back into the mothball, smelling seat of our Oldsmobile. I wept. I looked out the window. At the top of the hill, I saw them lower my grandfather into a place I would never be able to physically reach him ever again.
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I sit on my porch now, alone but happy. I sit here daily, motionless and without a care in the world. In Ohio, there’s a town that holds only 110 people, and I live in it. Children here, come passed my porch and say horrible slurs and I have no expression for them. They would call me “Lonely Old Bat” and “Mean Witch”, and the truth was I didn't care. When I was a youth, I pushed everyone away and as an adult, I changed. Reason being was because one year after another I began outliving people I cherished. My mother died from cancer of the brain, and then two years after that, my father died of many said was a broken heart. My dear sister Lilli was killed instantly in a car crash when she was just twenty and never bore children of her own. Elijah, my husband, was killed in action during WWII. We never had the chance to have children. In a short amount of time I was alone and it shocked my body a bit.
As I write what will probably be one of my last entries, it is beginning to rain. I feel different today. I cannot explain it. My bones are brittle. My body is heavy. I cannot walk as fast as I once did. The clothes that were in fashion during my youth were more form fitting, oh how I wish I could go back to that time when I did not feel so ancient. I remember the job I once had. I was a nurse. It made me feel peppy. I had such energy while working.
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I was thiry-six years old when I was at my peek in nursing. To me it wasn’t even a job. It was my life’s duty. I worked in the cancer center for children. Some of the kids were healed through Kemo, while others went home to what many people felt was back to God. I found my love for God in those children that I cared for at the hospital for over forty years. When I cared for each child I felt pieces of my brokenness chip away.
There was one child that I cared for so much more than anyone one that I had ever known. Her name was Delilah. She was my definition of happiness. Although she was drained physically she showed so much love in her spirit. After my shifts I would sit and talk to her until she fell asleep. I never wanted to leave. I came back the next day and her bed was empty. I had thought to myself that God took yet another person I came to love in life. But a fellow nurse came up behind me and told me not to cry and that Delilah was doing well enough to go back home. God had healed her. I was convinced.
I went to visit Delilah at her home in Cleveland, Ohio. Her mother answered the door and she let me in after finding out that I was the nurse that cared for her. Delilah and I sat and just played with toys and enjoyed each other’s company. When it came time for me to leave, I looked back at her and knew there was a God.
Through all my losses, Delilah was that one person that I needed to finally find God. Little did I know, God had been waiting there the whole time with His hands opened wide just waiting for me to run to Him. Delilah helped me find God in Ohio.
