There is a funeral at the church today.
Funerals are an interesting tradition. That we as humans take pause to remember the life of another.
I am lucky to have been to very few funerals. The one that stands out in my mind is my Oma’s. She passed away last Febrary after a long battle with heart disease and many other health problems.
When I saw her body in the casket it looked so empty and void of her spirit. She was gone and only the shell of her body remained.
I cried.
I cried when we sang hymns that she had loved and sang to us, I cried when I had to do a scripture reading in front of everyone, I cried when I saw the multitude of other family members crying.
I don’t think I was crying merely because I was sad that she was gone, rather at the magnitude of her life. She had lived through the war in Germany, had her heart broken by a man who promised to marry her, become an unwed mother and taken her three year-old daughter to Canada to find a better life, worked diligently at many hard labouring jobs to provide for herself and her daughter, married a farmer who became a raging alcoholic, and given birth to a second daughter (my mother). Along the way, she met Jesus and gave her life to Him. She prayed fiercely for her children and grandchildren and watched them all go through their own struggles.
Oma was not perfect. She was stubborn and tactless at times. She ate too much ice cream (I come upon my addictions honestly…it must be genetic) and she was a terrible packrat.
But all of her traits, her flaws, her aches, her loves…they made her who she was. And at her funeral I cried for all of those things. For how hard she had worked and how she had been hurt and how she had persevered and how she had prayed.
I cried for her life.
And for all of our lives.
How full and complicated and laced with joys and pains they all are.
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Just testing your comments for you.
Looks like the old ones are lost but the new ones are…found.
Yeah, I tried to post on the hearbeat post but couldn’t so here I am. How fast was the heartbeat? Slow for a boy & fast for a girl right? Kevs goes for an ultrasound on Monday & I was reading his info sheet. It says that they don’t tell you the sex of the baby here either. Turns out (when I was pregnant) it didn’t matter if I knew the sex of the baby either. I think though that we would wait for the first one & then after that we would want to find out. Good for you though. I think its fine to know the sex. That way you can start buying stuff already & pick out a name & just be better prepared. I’m sure you’ll be pooped when the little one does come. Who has time for shopping then? This is too long. Bye.
Amanda, Honey – your auntie was 8 when she came to Canada with Oma.
Sounds like you have arranged for this wonderful baby to be born on my birthday – July 17th. How sweet of you.
Love you.
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