Take It With You 10.31.2021
I remember when my Great Grandma Cannady passed. I was 12 years old. She lived with my Grandma and Papa Blankenship in my hometown, Martinsville, VA, so I saw her often. It’s funny the things you remember:
- Often a card table in the den with a puzzle in progress.
- Her and grandma snapping beans on the back deck.
- Absolutely no one could clean an ear of corn or a chicken leg like she could – and I don’t think she had teeth!
- She loved butter and tomato biscuits – homegrown and homemade.
- We built a modest wooden ramp at our front steps so she could manage birthday dinners at our house in her wheelchair.
- Family reunions in the Virginia mountains where she grew up.
It’s the first death I remember, and it somehow seemed right and natural to me. She had lived a long life, her health had been in gradual decline, and one evening Mom and Dad sat on the end of my bed and told me she had died. Her funeral was at the Primitive Baptist church in Floyd County, and I remember singing.
Since then I’ve experienced other such partings where life takes its natural, inevitable course and sorrow is mingled with joy and laughter as family and friends gather ‘round.
As well, there has been too much death that is senseless, not right, unnatural, and anger and sorrow crash in waves; will we ever catch our breath? In these moments the only hope I’ve ever known was a crucified son looking on His mother, God present in these godforsaken moments pointing us to the promise of His presence, and reminding us “that the poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the LORD will praise him…All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the LORD and he rules over the nations…Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!” (Psalm 22, emphasis mine) Or perhaps in other words, “It is finished!”
Trust. He who began a good work among you will be faithful to complete it!
– Giles Blankenship