I weep with sorrow;

encourage me by your word.

Psalm 119:28

We stopped taking pictures. 

That should’ve been a clue, but it wasn’t until years later I perceived this missing subtlety after trying in vain to put my finger on what had become undone and why. Then one day, in a moment of cloudless hindsight, I zeroed in on the absence of photos and home movies – no record of our comings and goings, the good times we were known for. The friends. The smiles. Even the silent laughter from the old 8mm reels. None of that. There was a clear and sudden lack of interest as if a massive velvet curtain had come down heavily on Act I of a play. 

 On the surface nothing had changed. The mechanical turnings of day-in-day-out which indicated  we were a functioning family still existed; adults went to work, kid went to school.  The gears kept on grinding. But there was no evidence. No proof of life. No pictures. It was an elusive clue to trauma. 

I finally recognized this span of time for what it had been for my parents, and to a lesser degree, for me. 

The very anchor that must’ve held our little family to the ground had come loosened when my mother’s mother, my Gram, died in our spare bedroom on a Saturday morning just before Christmas in 1970. Gravity lost its grip and what was once firmly bound, drifted.  We floated without a tether. As the weeks went by, doors were often shut, concealing hushed conversations between my parents, understandably excluding my 9-year old self. I often would sit with my knees drawn up under my chin, listening from the hall and watching the streak of light under the closed door for signs of movement to signal my need to disappear from my spy position. We stayed home for days and nights and nights and days. It may not have happened anywhere else in the universe that year, but on South Lashley Lane in Boulder, Colorado the earth’s rotation twitched, shivered imperceptibly, and changed for all time.  I see now my mother’s suffering.  Back then I did not. 

Gram lived an unenviable life during the years she shared with Grandpa. She had been an extraordinary young woman, happy, full of love. It was this overflowing capability to love that drew her to this man and his two young children who needed a mother. I, of course, was not there. So to be fair, I will not openly rail without discretion against my grandfather. Not only would it be dishonoring to the better aspects of his memory, but it would dishonor my own mother’s memory and her consistent, dogged effort to protect him from the criticism he most likely deserved. 

Seriously though. It’s hard to fathom. Weaving love with raw fear, occasional sweet days with excruciating abandonment, all together into a marriage and the responsibility of six children, seems like it would produce galling bitterness in the abused and abandoned one. It did not. Gram came through the other side without that. And when this extraordinary woman who defied earthly explanation left us without her, we didn’t thrive.

Underneath our English translations of Psalm 119:28 there is the original Hebrew, a poignant illustration of a slow inward grief, a constant wearing away of the soul. The version I am most comfortable with because it’s the one I learned from most deeply as a new believer, is the NIV. It “weep(s) with sorrow.” However, this verse in the King James paints a picture that may be closest to the original: “My soul melteth for heaviness . . . “ A striking image. 

The Hebrew word is: dā·lə·p̄āh.  

No other description fits more appropriately the condition of our family’s grief at this time of life. Melting. Heavy.

I’m fortunate to be a generation removed from having lived under that roof with my grandfather, but the DNA, the stories, the very bone marrow of who I am, is directly and deeply related to it. And when Gram died, a portion of the responsibility to remember fell on my shoulders because I was the grand child who knew her most. I want you to know about her. About her influence being so profound and the absence of her felt so equally profoundly that the tilt of the earth made an adjustment.

We, my parents and I, did indeed recover as you will read later on. It should come as no surprise. The Psalmist concluded 119:28 with “encourage me by your Word.” And God did indeed do just that.  Eventually.

My list of questions for my folks, however, remains as to how exactly that recovery transpired in their lives. Those questions will remain unanswered this side of heaven. But if you will allow a daughter/grand daughter’s conjecture, I have consistently clung firmly to the notion that once the storm clouds of unmanageable grief finally cleared enough to gather their thoughts, Mom and Dad looked not so much to their loss of her but to the legacy of strength and Christian hope she left them.

Gram always kept taking necessary steps. So did they. 

By the unspeakably magnificent grace of God, each one of us three would, by individual circuitous paths, find our way back to the fold of the church and the Life that had been shut away years before. No small part in my own tumbleweed-strewn pathway, and I expect my folks’ too, was carved out by a grandmother’s/mother’s presence, both when she was with us in person, and by the prayers she prayed on our behalf. Powerful.

Finally, and on a bit of a lighthearted note, I leave you with a quick Gram story. 

Molasses is an acquired taste. I embraced it young. She, braids pinned on top of her head and apron around her waist, would sit next to me at our linoleum kitchen table with a slice or two of white Wonder bread, slather it with butter, tear it into pieces which she’d drop in a bowl,  douse it all with a luscious sticky river of Brer Rabbit dark molasses, and hand me a fork. That, ladies and gents, is high living. It also likely contributed to my present-day hips but never you mind. It was comfort food and Gram was comfort personified.  May it be said of me with my grands — probably minus the molasses though because nobody knows nothin’ these days. 

She kept a diary for most of 1963. I have it. In case of fire I will grab it first. Well, I’ll actually snatch Bob and the dog first — depends on the day. This diary is mighty precious. It logs the “doings” of each day. No deep observations. Just a record of a life. Some days we had sandwiches for lunch. Once in a while it rained. A grandchild did a cute thing. So-and-so sent a letter that day and this-and-that family came for supper (not dinner, supper — she was southern). It’s perfect. And yes, I’d grab Bob first every single time.

You think I exaggerate the might of this meek and mild woman.

I do not.

She shifted the earth.