I love you. Thank you. God bless you.

Edith Kathleen Parker

This is my grandmother. 

She passed away last year at the age of 106.  Personally, despite having been around for 35 of those years, I find it difficult to envision living for that long.  She had accumulated a vast amount of wisdom during that time — hours of listening to her had taught me that much — but being in a body that old is … difficult.  Still, she had one final lesson for me during the last few days of her life that I think summed up her wisdom, and it’s something I’d like to share with you.

You can imagine that, at the age of 106, it was difficult for her to recognize people, to communicate, and to accomplish basic things like getting up and down.  Her sentences often came out in jumbled words, having unclear meaning (except to her), and my reactions ranged from bursting out laughing to complete confusion.  Her last illness landed her in the hospital, where she slept most of the time, and she was weakened to the point of not being able to say much.  It was hard to picture her being able to impart any final wisdom.  Many made that assumption in the last few years of her life.  It was amazing if she managed to get your name right.  But I learned on her final day that we had not been listening carefully enough.

Gramma was a woman of faith.  All who knew her would say that.  From my first memory of her, she was praying, trusting in God, and yearning to be used by Him.  She would often tell us the story of her conversion at 17 in a revival tent in New York and how she became an itinerant preacher and missionary, which eventually led her to Canada where she met my grandfather.  She had different roles through the years: teacher, wife, mother, minister, but she never stopped living the creed of wanting to be His instrument.  (I watched her preach her last sermon at the age of 99.  It was about God’s love, illustrated by the story of her life.)

What I realized in these last few years with my Gramma was that her life of faith resided in her memory, even when she couldn’t voluntarily access it.  When you asked her to pray, even her most topsy-turvy thoughts came out more clearly than at any other time.  Her prayers were amazingly powerful and beautifully sincere; prayer is what she held onto longer than anything else.  (If you ever wanted a reason to begin the habit of prayer, there you go.)

Asking her to pray wasn’t an option as she lay on her death bed.  She was too ill and weak to do anything.  Her filters were gone, her independence stripped away, and despite how kind everyone was, she had no idea what was happening to her.  But somehow, she did remember how to say the three things I had been hearing from her my whole life:  I love you. Thank you. God bless you.  When she had nothing else, she still had those three ideas.  Reflecting on them has led me to the conclusion that those are the main things we need to know.

“I love you” is a phrase we have said and heard many times.  Sometimes ardently, sometimes flippantly, sometimes thoughtlessly.  I don’t know if any other subject has been exegeted more, and I will not belabor the point of love because I think we all agree it’s important.  In Gramma’s life, I saw it exhibited by her actions for others, her acts of service, her kind words, her generous nature, and her worry of hurting others.  “Forgive me any time I’ve hurt you,” she said a lot.  For her, life was about God and therefore, others.  About showing them what they meant to her, about showing them how to relate to each other.  I can’t recall a single visit wherein she didn’t tell me she loved me at least once.  When I was in college, she wrote me hand-written letters every week, each one ending with the salutation: ‘lots of love.’  I never doubted the sincerity of the words and it was because she had demonstrated her love to me my whole life.  I learned from her that love is a way to bring the focus off ourselves, our needs, our tendency to wallow, and to be God’s instrument to someone else.

The second thing Gramma said that last day was, “Thank you,” a phrase almost automatic to her.  She thanked everyone for everything.  That’s a desirable trait, but as she got older and we had to help her do everything, she never failed to express gratitude for even the smallest things.  She thanked us for helping her get dressed, get food, get in and out of the car, … everything.  She’d get lifted out of her chair (with a grunt of pain over her arthritic leg), and immediately she’d say thank you. (Even one of the hospital nurses said, “She thanks me for everything, but I’m not doing that much!”)  Lately I have understood the grounding power of gratitude.  It gives us a firm grip on the reality of life, not hiding any of its trauma, but overshadowing it by the simple fact that we are still here, we have so much, and we don’t have to be afraid we won’t have enough. 

Gramma’s gratitude was focused on simple things.  Every year she’d send a book to each of her four sisters with the poems she’d written for them that year.  If you read through them, you would see how ‘small’ she lived, grateful for a call from one of her grandkids, thankful for a good parking spot at Costco, grateful for rain, grateful for church friends, grateful for letters.  I’m realizing that concentrating on the small things is the largest thing we can do because it keeps our world focused and in perspective.

“God bless you,” is the last thing my Gramma said to me.  As I said before, when all else was stripped from her, Gramma had her faith.  She had a firm belief that God was real, He was present to her, and since He was the most important thing in her life, she talked about Him more than anything else.  Gramma prayed every day; she prayed every minute.  She told me God was good in the middle of the hardest moments.  She was always looking for a way to tell people how good God was, including the grocery clerk or the ER doctor.

I am usually petrified of how someone will react if I mention God.  What if I offend them?  What if I push them farther away from Him?  But I can’t think of a single person who was ever offended by my grandmother.  Her genuine faith and kindness was as clear as her tissue-paper skin.  There was no hypocrisy to her desire that God bless the people around her, and she wasn’t afraid to be the means by which that was done.  While she was always aware of how her actions affected the people around her, what was most important was that everyone needs God.  All actions radiated from that point in her core.

I don’t like to do New Year resolutions.  I think it’s because I don’t want to set myself up to fail.  I do like thinking about something I can change.  Hopefully, it’s practical and achievable immediately.  I love one and done changes, the photo is now hung, the hair is now cut, the phone call is now made.  But thinking about Gramma’s 106 years of love, gratitude, and faith have made me realize that some change does not come about instantly.  Some things take a lifetime to build, so don’t delay starting.  All things are possible only through the LORD who strengthens us.

This New Year, my change is to be more like my Gramma.  My prayer is that I will be characterized by how tender I am towards others, how forgiving, how thoughtful.  I pray I will be characterized by how grateful I am, remembering to verbalize it, and to let it be translated into service and kindness.  I pray that I will be characterized by a lack of fear and worry, by hope and optimism that is encouraging to others.  Just like Gramma, I want to be remembered at the end of my life as a woman of faith, someone who loved God, who put Him first, and was never afraid or ashamed of that most important relationship.

I must give co-credit to my mother for this post who both lovingly edited and gave many words that formed a tribute to her own mother that I am thrilled to post on what would have been my Gramma's 107th birthday.