TRANSITION

Early Saturday morning a new grandson was born four weeks early to my #2 daughter and her husband.  My daughter shared with me that as she lay on the operating table, a kindly older anestheseologist sat next to her head wiping her mouth after she was nauseated, drying her tears, and quietly and calmly reassuring her.  I could not help but picture God sitting right there next to her.  And then I pictured her dad sitting there calmly reassuring her.  It’s moments like these that God uses to speak to my heart showing me that He hasn’t forgotten me or my 4 daughters.

This is an emotional week as I come up on the 4th anniversary of Bob’s entrance into heaven.  I am a person that has very vivid dreams. Just this morning I dreamed that I was talking to someone who brought up the subject of transition. As this person tried to explain to me what transition means, my heart broke as I shared with her that the transition since the death of my husband has been so very hard.  I then fell on my knees to the floor and began to sob.  I awoke to a pounding heart and heavy breathing as if I were actually sobbing in reality.

As my morning wore on, I continued to feel a sense of panic that I just couldn’t shake.   So, I did what I have always done in the last four years to calm myself.  I got in my car and drove out into the country for several hours to spend time with God and ask Him what my dream was all about.  As I drove, I turned on Moody Radio and listened to licensed clinical christian counselor Ray Kane talk about triggers in our lives.  One thing he said was:

“A trigger is pain that God allows to surface giving us the opportunity to deal with it so we can connect with God on a deeper level.”

It was then that I realized that my dream was a grief trigger – another pain that God allowed to surface giving me the opportunity to deal with yet more grief so that I can connect with God on a deeper level.  You’d think after 4 years of grief work that my work would be done, but evidently it is still a work in progress.

Transitioning from two grandparents to a single grandmother is not a place I ever expected to be.  Having new grandchildren that will never hear the booming laugh of their grandpa, experience the love that he would have for them, ride with him on his John Deere, listen to him talk to them about how much God loves them — all of these things are never to be and that is extremely painful to me and to my daughters.

It was okay for me to take time today to again grieve this loss and this transition in my life, but I have to choose not to sit in that grief when there is the joy of a new life that has been gifted to our family.  I accept the baton my husband handed off to me in his transition from earth to heaven leaving me here to be sure that my new grandsons know how much he would have loved them, but most of all making sure that they know the love of God.