Six years ago, in the wee hours, my phone rang. I was bleary from 27 hours of travel, and barely able to discern where I was. The noises, the smells… it was all wrong. I was not in Nepal, not in the house that had only just recently begun to feel like home. I was in my in-law’s spare bedroom, on a mattress made of springs instead of coconut hulls, with the gentle whirring of central heating as the background noise instead of the random bleats of goats or the insistent brrrruuuussssh, brrrruuuussssh of the hunched woman who swept the street in front of our gate.
Of course, my life had already changed, had already been altered so deeply in the past two days that it would have never been the same. But God had one more line on the page of that chapter. The phone call was my father informing me that my Mamaw had passed away just an hour before.
And that was how what would become my “new normal” began.
The fact that it’s been six years now seems both shockingly far away, and still too raw and recent. I can (and do) still find myself sobbing with the grief of missing Mamaw. When I am stuck, unable to work my brain around some conundrum in life—usually in regards to my kids— it’s her voice I hear: “Young’in, have you prayed?” I catch flashes of my grit in Birdie and recognize it as hers first. I tie on an apron and picture her in the kitchen Papaw built to her exact specifications, right down to the oddly placed ceiling fan she defended to the end as a necessity in the home of an older Southern woman. I hear her singing Amazing Grace with us at Family Worship. I feel her beside me when I’m afraid, reminding me that Satan would make cowards of us all, but that because I belong to Jesus, the demons tremble when they see me coming.
I miss her.
This week is Thanksgiving, and I have so much for which to be thankful. In a time when the whole nation (world?) is preoccupied with the concept of health, my people are well. My husband has found multiple avenues in which to continue his call to missions and equipping believers despite travel shutdowns, closed borders, and lockdowns. Our children are all working towards their callings, whether that work is finding a teaching position when schools in Nepal reopen, reenacting life in a Native American village, taking classes towards a degree, or learning to write three-paragraph papers. We are blessed with extended family, and good friends. I am expecting our tenth child. Our home is warm. The sun rose this morning.
I am very thankful for my present, but I am also thankful for my past. For my grandmother, and everything she folded into me that made me who I am. It sounds trite to say it, but I honestly don’t know who I would be without her standing in the gap, providing the stability and love and hard line of truth that never wavered throughout my growing up years. I’m thankful for this good, and you know, I’m thankful for the bad. Yes, even for the shell shocked season that found us sitting in a completely empty house two weeks after landing stateside. For a childhood heavier on the hurts and hard than anyone would choose. I’m grateful for all of it. I can’t ask for any of it to be erased, after all, without tarnishing or changing the blessing I feel in this moment, now, to be standing in this spot looking out at a life I wouldn’t change.
Thursday morning, as we return the extra leaf to its place in the table to accommodate the older kids being home, I will be thankful for all the faces gathered round. I will miss those who are not with us, either because they have passed on to a greater praise celebration, or distance keeps us apart, or even because covid fears have shied them away. But I will give thanks for what I have, as well as what I have had. The first lines of the Magnificat, the beautiful song in Luke 1 which Mary pronounces upon her visitation with her cousin Elizabeth, reads best in Latin, I think:
Magníficat ánima mea Dóminum.
Et exultávit spíritus meus: in Deo salutári meo.
But it means:
My soul doth magnify the Lord.
And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.
This is my goal this Thanksgiving: magnifying the Lord, and rejoicing in God my Savior through whatever has passed, and whatever comes.
My Mamaw would most definitely approve.