Last Thanksgiving I laid my dad to rest. Well actually, God did that. He’s the Giver and Taker of life. I simply committed his body to the ground. But as the anniversary of his death has crept up on me these past few weeks, my mind has whisked me back through a Thanksgiving Parade of memories. Perhaps insipid to others, but intensely personal to me, I’ve enjoyed these precious moments of reflection that jostle my emotions all over the psychological spectrum.
In a few hours, I’ll be visiting my mom. Oh, she is very much alive; yet I find myself as saddened over my reflections surrounding her as much as those surrounding my father. The simple reason for my melancholy hovers around her dementia. Whereas I reminisce over so many wonderful family moments that have spanned the past six decades, her mind is trapped somewhere between the 1930’s and 40’s. It pains me to watch her navigate through her cluttered memory as she wrestles to grasp a particular event or person once very familiar to her.
Yet it is in this dichotomy that I receive my deepest sense of Peace. Dad is in The Better Place. Having yielded his earthly life to serving the King of all kings, he is now reaping all the blessings of his Kingdom labor in his Heavenly life. And as for mom, she’s got her Heaven-reservation paid in full. She too gave her life to the Savior and strove to live a life of faith in order to please Him. And though she recollects so very little of this now, her day is soon coming when she will experience what no Hollywood version of Total Recall could ever produce.
Yep, I’m at Peace; because dad is already Home and mom is well on her way. So in my reflectively thankful moments, let me make it manifestly clear that they are not experienced in either the abstract or in a vacuum. They are rooted in a resolute conviction that in order to be truly thankful, there must be someone to whom that thanks is generated. I am inexpressibly grateful to God for the life and death – no, make that eternal life – of my dad who is enjoying the eternal bliss of Heaven. But I am equally grateful that my mom will soon be shedding her mortal flesh and inhabit her immortal body to join him; which will include a perfectly sane mind. “Thank you Heavenly Father. I am beyond grateful“.