Chicken Soup for the Grandma's Soul (11 page)

Grandma never missed an opportunity to take any situation and turn it into a learning session. I vividly remember the time we visited the old, rickety, smelly outhouse at Great-Grandma's farm. There, in that most unlikely place, was one beautiful flower blooming through a crack in the floor. Grandma quickly explained that no matter how bad the situation or how dark and dismal things might look, there was always hope. Just as the flower could bloom in the most difficult circumstances, so could we, because God was faithful and could make something beautiful from the ashes of our lives.

That is why I was calling for my grandma in my hour of need. Soon she appeared at my door with the bottle of anointing oil in her hands. I had no doubt God would hear her simple prayer for my healing and grant her request for a miracle to save my leg. When Grandma finished praying, I knew I had been healed, and I fell into a beautiful, peaceful sleep, not at all worried about tomorrow. I had a deep abiding peace that my life would be spared and I would always walk on two legs.

The next morning at the doctor's office, my parents anxiously waited while the doctor unwrapped the bandage. All eyes were on him as he stood in obvious amazement. Slowly he shook his head and said, “I have seen a miracle. There is no way the small dose of penicillin could have done this. There had to be a power higher than me working on this leg.”

The surgery was cancelled, my leg rebandaged, and I went home to recover without need for further antibiotics.

Today, I still have the ugly scar to remind me of this very traumatic time in my life. But I also still have two legs, which reminds me of God's healing power, a praying grandma, and that flowers bloom in the most difficult circumstances.

Sharon Ozee Siweck

“Grandma, can you bounce me on your knee,
or is it too busy praying?”

Reprinted by permission of Jonny Hawkins. ©2005.

Angel in the Clouds

T
he guardian angels of life sometimes fly so
high as to be beyond our sight, but they are
always looking down on us.

Jean Paul Richter

The anesthesiologist covered my face with the mask while I counted one-hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven. . . .

My ordinary world was gone.

Seven hours later, I awoke under painfully bright lights. Through the confusion of tubes, monitors and beeping machines, I realized I was in the recovery room of St. Mary's Hospital. I couldn't feel my legs. Thunderous spasms of pain pelted my head. I couldn't talk. Something obstructed my throat. I tried to spit it out, but I couldn't. It was a tube. I thought my head would explode. Then blackness . . .

My dream world began.

My husband and kids, I heard them. But where were they? I tried to touch them, see them, but all went black. It seemed like only seconds later that beautiful, silver-flecked clouds billowed above me. A beam of white light shown about, and within its center I could see a human shape. It was my grandmother, whom I had cared for until she died in my home two years earlier. She wore a long white robe, soft and shimmering as pure silk. The wrinkles had vanished from her face, and the gray no longer mingled with her dark hair. A halo surrounded her, like sunshine glistening on a field of freshly fallen snow.

My grandmother reached out her loving arms. I yearned to go into them as I had done as a child. Mother's smile (I called her Mother) radiated an aura of absolute rapture such as I had never seen before. I wanted to go with her to that place that provided such happiness and held no pain. My body wanted to rise and lift toward the white-clad figure. The lights were enticing, and Mother beckoned me to her bosom. My body levitated, but my right hand clutched onto something holding me down. It was as if my husband and three children were an anchor, and I held its cable. As my grandmother summoned and the desire to release my hand from the heavy cordage grew greater, my body floated up, up, up—except for the right hand that held on tightly and refused to let go.

I desired the peace and tranquility that Mother in the billowy clouds offered, but the hand held on, and I dared not loosen it. Even in my unconscious state, I knew that by relaxing a hand muscle for only a second, the blinding pain in my head would be gone and I would join my grandmother in heaven. Yet the hand held on. Mother smiled, letting me know it was okay to hold on as she faded into the clouds.

I heard someone call my name.

Mother?
I opened my eyes expecting to see my grandmother.

The lady standing beside my bed was dressed in white, but instead of a gown, she wore a nurse's uniform. “Welcome back. We thought we were going to lose you there for a while.” She smiled. “Your husband and three children are here. They've been waiting for three days for you to come out of that sleep.”

I tried to reach for them, but my right arm would not move. The fingers on that hand would not release their grip on the mattress.

The operation was an apparent success. The shunts drained the fluid in my spinal cord, yet my right arm was paralyzed. Deep within myself, I knew. Perhaps I could never explain it to others, but I knew I had made the choice. I elected to live, and Mother approved.

I also realized that I had the courage to undergo the second corrective surgery to stop the headaches. There was still the danger of death when the surgeon's knife would cut into my brain, but I knew I could not lose. Not with Mother and her tranquil beam of light waiting on the other side and a precious family, for whom it was worth giving one's right arm, waiting on earth.

Jean Kinsey

Parting Gifts

P
rayer begins where human capacity ends.

Marian Anderson

Paralyzed with fear, I stood in the vacant dining room of a nursing home in Tennessee watching CNN track the approach of a killer.

It was 3 A.M., August 28, 1992. A night-shift attendant was keeping watch beside a wide-screen TV. I had come looking for a glass of water to sustain a vigil of my own, but was captured by a strange irony. Computerized weather maps were tracking Hurricane Andrew's relentless and deadly assault on the South Florida coast. No power on earth could arrest, avert or deter this category five monster from destroying everything in its path.

Down the hall my ninety-two-year-old grandmother was also fighting a formidable foe. As inescapable as that hurricane, there was no way to slow death or speed it up, we just had to face it . . . together. This would be our final memory—the hardest and the best.

“Mimi” had lived with our family for ten years. She watched our daughter grow up and fascinated her with stories about life on a southern farm at the turn of the twentieth century. She and Leina had been coconspirators, faithful confidantes and pseudo-siblings. It was a rich and rewarding exchange.

At the age of ninety-one, however, Mimi suffered a series of ministrokes that ultimately placed her in a nursing home. After the last major stroke, she couldn't swallow.

This night, I was feeding her liquids with a syringe, measuring drops as she had once done for me as a premature baby. It was very difficult to see her this way. I had prayed every way I knew how and was almost prayed out.

Then insight spoke. What I needed was a prayer partner— someone to hold me up right then in prayer. Earlier I had sent my family home to rest. There wasn't a phone in the room, but I knew that God could prompt a heart to pray, so I asked him.

Thirty minutes later, the head nurse was taking vital signs when we heard a commotion outside the door. She slipped out, and through the cracked door I heard her calming one of the residents. A sweet, endearing lady, Miss Minnie was forever getting lost and confused looking for her room. Again the nurse tried to point her toward her room some distance away. Again the protest: “But I
need
to pray!”

Something propelled me toward the door, and as I opened it, the nurse apologized, “She says she has to pray
here . . . now.
”

“By all means, let her come in!” My response was automatic as I opened wide the door.

Miss Minnie walked in, not with her usual hesitant shuffle, but with a purposeful stride that took her right to the head of Mimi's bed. She laid her hand on my grandmother's head and issued the most beautiful, coherent prayer of healing I had ever heard. When she was done, I knew that whatever happened, everything was going to be all right. I looked into her eyes to thank her. The usual look of doubt and confusion was gone. There was a fire in her eyes, a commanding countenance of faith, purpose and resolve. I later learned she had once been a devoted person of prayer, but the next day she couldn't even remember that she had prayed.

During the remaining hours that night, Mimi slipped into a coma. I held her hand, asking God to gently shepherd her home, asking him to protect the people in Andrew's path. At times I wondered if this was how Jacob felt in the Bible the night he wrestled with an angel till dawn. Like Jacob, I was determined to wrest a blessing from this painful ordeal . . . a resurrection moment I could hold in my heart. Jacob got his blessing at dawn. For some reason, 7 A.M. was in my mind.

At 6 A.M. the nurses were unable to record vital signs, but Mimi's breathing was measured and methodical, as if she were running a race. I sat beside her, stroking her brow and speaking gently. As deliberate as a soldier's march was each labored breath. She slept on.

Suddenly, on impulse, I pulled back the window curtain and noticed a faint rosy glow on the horizon. I looked back at Mimi and . . .
as if arriving
. . . she took a deliberate, almost satisfied, last breath. Her journey was complete. Her rest was won. I glanced down at my watch and it was . . . seven o'clock! I just sat there stunned, unable to get up, somehow grateful to be alone.

My thoughts drifted to those who'd been wrestling with the reality of the storm, and my heart laid claim to a prayer that out of all their pain and suffering there would be an offsetting blessing too. I later learned that 7 A.M. was the official time of sunrise on Aug. 28, 1992, and the moment when Hurricane Andrew abated.

Marcia Swearingen

A Teenager's Song for Gramma

T
his world is not conclusion, a sequel stands
beyond—Invisible, as music, but positive, as
sound.

Emily Dickinson

As I sort through stacks of sheet music next to the piano, I come across an almost-bare sheet of music—only a few measures of notes scrawled in my own sloppy script.

I stare at the unfinished waltz and my mind travels through the memories of my great-gramma Fritz.

I find myself standing in the huge garden next to Gramma's white farmhouse in rural Iowa. Gramma loved plants and flowers. She cared for them all and prayed for them individually. I see her kneeling next to a soft mound of soil where a seed has just been planted. Gramma makes the sign of the cross over it and says, “God bless you, grow.”

Gramma Fritz was a creator. Nothing went to waste at her house. She used every scrap of fabric to make her famous quilts and “rag rugs.” She made mats out of bread sacks and doll clothes out of flour sacks. Every scrap of food was eaten, every bone boiled for broth.

Everything Gramma used was an original—like her— the meat grinder her mother used and the foot-powered sewing machine. When I told her about microwave ovens she quipped, “That's all I need—some machine to help me get fat faster!”

That was Gramma. Witty, clever and a little sarcastic. I'd been told that “Little Anna Fritz” never outgrew her schoolgirl spunk. She could outwit anyone—like a “stubborn German”—and everyone loved her for it. She always had a quip or quote. She blamed modern commercial Christmases on “Those wise men who just had to bring gold into the situation.”

After ninety years of strength and health, Gramma got sick. Sometimes she was winning her battle with congestive heart failure, other times she was not. When I realized that Gramma, like her beloved springtime, would not last forever, I wanted to do something really special for her, in honor of her. I wanted to write a song—more than a song, a beautiful piano piece. I wanted to capture my love for her and her spirit in music. It sounded easy, but it was not. Too soon I learned that composing the kind of music I wanted took a lot more than strong will and eight years of music lessons. I kept my goal a secret, though I don't know why. Day after day, I tried and tried, refusing to give up, while becoming increasingly frustrated.