A Birthday and a Funeral
On Friday our granddaughter will turn three! Throughout the past month we’ve been excitedly preparing for our road trip to Florida to celebrate her birthday.
This week we’ve also been planning my mother-in-law’s funeral.
Is it possible to be both numb and excited simultaneously? Both mournful and joyous at the same time? Both happy and sad? To anticipate the celebration of one life while preparing to say goodbye to another?
Yes. And more than that: grateful! It may seem odd, but here’s why:
· We’re celebrating the birthday of our beautiful granddaughter
· Were NOT attending HER funeral
· We’re celebrating a long and full life of a strong, beautiful woman, wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother.
· My husband’s (almost) entire family will be attendance at the funeral — it will feel like a family reunion, in spite of the occasion, after many years of distance and circumstance preventing them from being together.
While she is not my mother, she has been my mother-in-law for over 40 years. She and my father-in-law were our first babysitters for our children (and the only ones we trusted for a long time). They took our children to church before we found one of our own and began attending as a family.
She introduced me to southern cooking and how to be a “formal Southern hostess.” She worked her entire adult life, and volunteered many hours for various causes. She had a pride in her appearance, in her work and in her family.
She was like my own mother in all the “mom” ways, though they were very different and had different upbringings, backgrounds and perspectives on almost everything.
Having lost my own mom several years ago doesn’t make it any easier to say good-bye. But I do have the knowledge and experience to know that the sorrow will ease and the hurt will fade, even though the memories never will. I can walk with my husband through his grief journey, and I pray I’m up to the task of being a support and comforter as he starts down the path.
I don’t understand any of it — at all! I’m not particularly fond of not knowing what’s to come in this lifetime. But I am grateful to anticipate with great gladness what is to come in the next!
Carole King sang it so beautifully:
So don’t let it get you down, my friend, though it seems the blues will never end
On this you can depend, they always do
And I can tell you that it’s true, it’s a feeling that can’t be beat
And you’ve got to do it
You’ve got to take the bitter with the sweet
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