2016 Cherished Blogfest entry: Life is so beautiful

My laptop is a technological marvel that connects me with people all over the world, but it is three pages of cheap stationery that I cherish, for they connect me with only one.

After my mother died, I found the pages inside the front cover of a photo album. In flowing cursive, Mama professes love for family and friends, but also for her god.

Life is so beautiful

When you are diagnosed with cancer, the small insignificant things become very important. Things you have experienced before take on such a deeper meaning.

A butterfly flying past the window, a morning sunrise witnessed on the porch of your home and shared with your husband and your son, who came to visit, is such evidence of God’s creative beauty.

Love, concern, and prayers of family and friends seem to waft around you, enveloping you in such a spirit of peace, that it feels like you are wearing them like a warm blanket of God’s wonderful love.

You seem to be able to communicate better with those you love and who love you. You are invited into their hearts and souls, thoughts that you never realized were there. You can laugh together and cry together and not feel ashamed.

Blessings come in such unusual ways. A neighbor bringing a beautiful framed prayer, another bringing a white rose bud to your door, with a friend quoting helpful scripture, cards and letters in the mail from friends whom you love. Your daughter, who has had cancer before you, who will be your rock as you see the love light in her eyes. A son-in-law sending you an inspirational book containing angel expressions. A phone call from each of your five precious grandchildren, each uniquely different, but with the same wonderful love flowing out to you, as you have for each of them.

The visits of friends from a distance and from the park where you live.

Those are just a few of my observations from the first week.

God is so good!

I don’t often remove my mother’s words from the box where I keep them, but when I do, they move me to tears, and not just for the reason you think.

Mother and son, in happier times.

How sad would Mama be to learn that the son who stood beside her and witnessed the dawn, would be driven from her god by the horror of her death, and a resolve that I would worship no god that allows such agony as she endured.

Alas, Mama would only blame herself for my fall.

Her “observations from the first week” are amazing, inspiring, but I recall her misery from pancreatic cancer, which got worse — far worse — before it ended.

But through it all, Mama was steadfast: “God is so good!”

Tears flow. Hands that hold the pages shake.

Through three pages of stationery we briefly connect, but soon she drifts away, a chasm of disbelief between us now, wider even than the span between life and death.

My father and sister at my mother’s grave after the placement of her headstone. Daddy now rests beside her.