My Grandma Mary
My grandmother (the last of my grandparents) passed away a couple of weeks ago. She was born in 1917 during WWI and nearly made it to her 106th birthday. I attended her celebration of life (it didn't feel much like a funeral) and had some thoughts and feelings I'd like to share. My mother wrote the following about her mother and spoke to those who attended these words. God did something at this service I'd like to share at the end. It was a blessing to me.
Thank you for coming today. And thank you for your friendship with my mother. I know each of you was important to her, as was this church.
I don’t know how to condense a person’s life into just a few minutes. But I would like to share some of the things my mother taught me.
My mother never told me I could do anything I set my heart to do. But she did teach me that — without words — as I observed her life. Those of you who know her well know that when she is determined to do something, she will not be denied. That evidently started early in her life.
When she was a child, her parents decided to give her piano lessons. But the teacher refused because my mother was tone deaf. Not to be deterred, my mother went home and played the top note on the piano and the bottom note over and over until she could tell the difference. Then she played the next note down and the next note up, continuing this technique until she had played all the notes on the piano. She taught herself to play the piano that way and when I was a child, she gave piano lessons to other children. When I was an adult, she bought an organ and took organ lessons. She even traveled to Chicago to give an organ recital there. When her organ teacher had to be out of town, he asked my mother to teach his students for him. No one ever knew she was tone deaf.
As a young adult, she was diagnosed with a thyroid disorder and was advised to rest. Her father didn’t believe in anyone doing nothing, so he enrolled her in art school in St. Louis. In her first class, a woman in a robe walked to the front of the room and disrobed. My mother was shocked. She had never seen a naked woman before. The art teacher came up to her and said, “You’ve never done any art before, have you? You don’t belong here. Go home.”
But her father had paid for her art instruction, along with room and board, so she couldn’t quit. Instead, she stuck it out and at the end of the year she received an award for the most improved student and was urged to continue her art education there. She has been an artist ever since and has won numerous awards for her paintings and her 5-minute chalk drawings.
Learning was a life-long pursuit for her. When she wanted something done, she learned how to do it herself. She learned electronics when she wanted something wired. She took carpentry classes when she wanted furniture for our home. She taught herself how to upholster furniture. When she and her husband went to Central and South America, she learned Spanish. When she was the church secretary, she learned Hebrew.
After she had a radical mastectomy, she was told should would not be able to raise her right arm. You didn’t tell that to my mother. Of course she exercised that arm until eventually was able to use it again. When she had knee surgery at the age of 94, she was told she couldn’t drive until she could do certain exercises with that knee. She was back driving in 10 days.
My mother’s life wasn’t always easy. When I was 2, my parents bought a telephone company and instead of borrowing any more money than was absolutely necessary, they “made do” with what they had. We lived in the one room in the back of the telephone office, which had no running water. My mother walked a block and a half to the city well every day or several times a day to haul water for our family’s needs. I slept in a dresser drawer instead of a bed. My father went to the town dump and found a hot plate, which he fixed so my mother had something to cook our meals on. We had no chairs, so we sat on nail kegs. My mother made cushions for them. I remember eating only dried beans for every meal day after day. My mother, who had grown up in a fairly wealthy family, never complained or felt sorry for herself. She said it was like “camping out” and that was attitude toward it.
The townspeople thought we were poor. I wasn’t aware of that. We had riches they had no idea about. Every morning my mother would wake me up by saying, “It’s a beauuuutiful day in Chicago.” because she was listening to the National Farm and Home Hour that originated in Chicago and that’s how the announcer would start the program. When she was in Assisted Living in Custer I’d visit her and say, “It’s a beautiful day” and she’d respond, “In Chicago.”
As I watched my mother, I learned that in “whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.”
In spite of our poverty, my mother always found someone else worse off than herself to take care of. She befriended a woman who was horribly crippled with rheumatoid arthritis and had great open sores on her legs. My mother would go to her home and clean and dress her wounds and take care of her. She never asked anything in return. She sent a Christmas box every year to an orphanage in Germany. She bought fabric and patterns and sewed clothes for children who didn’t have the money to buy nice clothes. She invited children who didn’t have a mother into her home and made cookies with them, doing the things a mother would normally do with them.
My mother was a school teacher and at night she manned the switchboard at the telephone company. She was a Red Cross instructor and, besides giving lessons, she was the first person called when there was any emergency in our town such as car accidents and drownings. She was a Hospice volunteer. She taught Sunday school. She taught Bible and art classes. At one time she was teaching three Bible classes and all were different. She sewed her own and my sister’s and my dresses, along with our dolls’ clothes. She fixed three meals a day every single day from scratch. We never ate out. She painted signs to make extra money. She had a garden and canned the produce. She cut our hair. She washed our clothes in a wringer washing machine and hung them out to dry.
When she moved to her home on Rimrock Highway, her neighbors didn’t have a telephone, so she bought them one and strung a wire from her house to theirs so they could at least have some contact with someone outside their home.
There were times I’d hear her say, “I’m so weary, weary, weary.” But she never slowed down and she never quit. I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t help her miuch. And she never asked.
As I watched her life, I learned that “whatsoever I do, to do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.” And that “when you wait upon the Lord, He renews your strength,” her favorite verse.
Of course — like all of us — there were times in her life when people did not treat her kindly or fairly. She was stolen from, ridiculed for her faith and on occasion turned on by the very people she had been kind to. When someone very close to her stole from her, I was appalled. But, as I watched her reaction, I learned that people and relationships are far more important than “things.”
Like Jesus, “When she was reviled, she reviled not again; when she suffered, she threatened not; but committed herself to Him that judges righteously.”
After my dad died, my mother remarried. To say her second husband was unkind to her is a gross understatement. For years after his death, she suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There were times she feared for her life. She told my sister that she never knew whether she or her husband would be dead by morning as he walked through the house night after night toting a loaded gun. He stole all her money and didn’t share his with her. He spit in her face.
But she never left him. She never did him any harm. She stuck by him, loving and caring for him for the 17 years of their marriage until he died in 1982. He gave his life to the Lord shortly before he died.
Without words, she taught me that “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”
When my mother died, she left me no inheritance of money, houses or lands, no gold or silver or precious jewels. She gave away her money and her possessions to others, along with her time, her talents and her energies.
But she did leave me an inheritance — a priceless inheritance far above the price of any material possessions.
Without words, she taught me many life lessons — by living her life before me — a life of sacrifice, yet of true abundance. I was blessed to be her daughter.
That concludes what my mother said. She ad libbed a bit, so some of it is now lost, but you get the idea of the kind of life her mother lived. I'd like to share much more than just this with my audience, but time and other constraints won't allow. (The pastor had much to say about her life, as he witnessed 40 years of it. He choked up several times. Several others shared their experiences of my grandmother.) My grandmother was one of the founding members of the church where the services were held. What brought that about? She was at a different church where she taught Sunday school and led a little girl to the Lord one day. The little girl went and told her father, who was the preacher of the church, what happened, how Jesus came into her heart. The man told my grandmother never to do that again. She went home, no doubt in prayer and very troubled. Leading someone to the Lord is cause for celebration. No doubt in prayer about this event, she was watching a preacher on TV one day and the man said, "Leave that church," and she took it to heart as an answer to prayer. She started meeting with a handful of people who met at a gas station across the street from where the present church stands. From that humble group grew a church that continues to bless people. And that's also a metaphor for how my grandmother lived her life. Just following the Lord and pressing forward and seeing each day as a blessing God gives His kids. What grew out of that had long-lasting implications for thousands.
There is one more thing I'd like to say.
In her memorial flyer, it mentioned her favorite verse is Isaiah 40:31: "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." Indeed, many of her paintings were of bald eagles and I couldn't help but consider the probable inspiration was this verse. There was a poster downstairs where we ate lunch after the service with bald eagles and this verse on it. It was clear God was telling me something, and when I stepped outside after services to go home, a bald eagle flew across the road directly in front of the church. The point had been made. The Lord was there at this service for his saint, a woman who had served him well. I wasn't sad at the services. (After lunch, I gathered up the kids and we headed to the game room. Seeing those kids have fun at what one might consider a somber event was the highlight of my trip.) I was blessed by it, challenged, and convicted, even. But not sad. Her life, though not entirely easy, was a blessing to so many. And God blessed her and satisfied her with long life, as He promised, because she served Him. Seeing what He did through her life was a blessing to me. I know she did much more than we will ever know. Her service was a quiet service to the Lord. It didn't need to be proclaimed. God saw it. She gave everything away but somehow was very rich. I was reminded of my friend Cindy's dad's service when he passed away nearly two years ago. I got to watch, and it stuck with me ever since. If I could live a life of service like that to the Lord, I would be very happy. I don't know what God will do with my life, but I gave Him what I have left and hope He does something like what I saw in those two lives. Amen.
Christian blog: a-better-hope.blogspot.com
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