My sweet grandmother, Frances McFerrin, is not doing very well. The past four years we have watched her get weaker, moving from her senior living community to an assisted living home, to one that provides more care, to the emergency room back in May, to a nursing home and now back at her home under hospice care.
She has always been the strongest woman, a truly great lady full of grace and kindness. I can only hope I am like her one day.
It's just so heartbreaking. I know some people say that religion is only good for comforting people... I just believe it to my core that when we die we do not just cease to exist. There are souls inside of us. Without them we would be nothing. Souls are what allow us to fight and to love and to appreciate everything good and beautiful. Souls are what make us greater than animals. I know they exist because I see my grandmother giving up hers a little more each day. I just want Him to call her home to be with her husband and her sisters.
My mother already asked me to make a memorial video for her. I don't know if you look at my other blog If I Were Artemis regularly, but that is why I have been scanning all these vintage pictures. You can see a few more here.
Frances is second from the left and first on the left
The past few weeks have been so overwhelmingly difficult. I have been trying to get ready to leave for college in August and I am too emotionally exhausted to deal with anything. We come home from caring for her and just go to bed most nights or I zone out in front of the computer, not accomplishing anything. I have a few more goals that I really wanted to hit hard this month but you know what, it's just not going to happen. We are all just too tired and that is okay.
Throughout all this, I have learned that family is the most important bond we can have, never take it for granted, and that in the end we all return to dust. The greatest thing we can accomplish in life is to love one another with everything that we have. You can't take anything with you; the only thing that matters is the legacy you leave behind.
"For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s" - Romans 14:8
Anna, I have enjoyed looking at these pictures. I hope that you will go back and add names to the ones that you have not done thus far.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for doing this. God Bless you all.
Ann Johnson Bowes