CALLING HOURS

     Friday afternoon and school was out for Christmas vacation.  The ground was snow covered already.  Not long after I got off the school bus my mother handed a bag of groceries to me with instructions to take it to my maternal grandmother.  My grandparents' house was no more than a half mile away and it was like a second home to me.  My grandfather was not yet home from his job of hauling livestock each day to the Cleveland Stock Yards.  In the summers I sometimes rode in the truck with him as he left around sunrise each day to pick up stock at farms and go on to Cleveland.  He would unload and then take me to get lunch in a big room with yellow block walls and noisy men all around.  Then back home.


     I walked right into Grandma's house without knocking like I always did.  But something was different.  She did not answer my soft call; soft because I thought she might be asleep since the door into her bedroom was closed.  So, I quietly left.  At least that is how I have always recalled this day for sixty-five years now.  When I came back to our house I told my mom that grandma was asleep and that I left the groceries on the table.  Years later my mom would admit to me that she and others in the family believed that my grandmother was already dead on the kitchen floor when I arrived and that is why I said "grandma is asleep".


     If that was the case, then my merciful, omnipotent Heavenly Father made my grandmother invisible to spare me the trauma of finding her dead.  But, why was the bedroom door closed?  It never was and that is why I recall it so vividly.  When my grandfather arrived home, at the same time as my cousin Mary who lived with them, grandma was indeed dead on the kitchen floor.  She had died of a coronary embolism when she bent over to light her gas oven to bake cookies.  She had a medical history of her blood forming clots and carried a nitro pill in the pocket of her apron.  Evidently, medical science in 1950 did not know that half an aspirin each day would have extended my grandmother's life.


     The phone at our house rang and my mom and dad rushed out the door while my uncle Dale remained with my brother and me.  Our phone rang again in a few minutes. Uncle Dale answered it; put the receiver down; turned to me and said:  "Your grandmother has died."  I recall vividly just staring for the longest time at the beautifully decorated Christmas tree and trying to comprehend what death was.   The next day I was sent to stay with my uncle Bud and aunt Eleanor while relatives came from far and near to stay either at our house or with my grandfather.  The undertaker, Cal Bender, prepared my grandmother's body and placed it in a plain, cloth covered casket and brought it back to the house.  There in the northwest corner of the living room the earthly tabernacle in which my grandmother had dwelt, lay in state until the funeral, the day after Christmas.   Friends and relatives came at any time from morning until evening for two days.   This is, of course, very different from the current practice of the family standing in a receiving line at designated times.  I much prefer the older way.


      My uncle Bud must have brought me out to the house each morning of those two days because it seems like I was there most of the time.  Much of that time my cousin Duane and I played outside in the snow.  But once I stood by the casket and watched one of mom's brothers as a large tear rolled down his face and landed on the soft white material that lined that casket.   He went on to become an alcoholic, lost a great job with a large corporation and died a pitiful human being.   Another of my mom's brothers was still in his twenty-five year career with the Navy and I stared in fascination at his uniform.  But he laughed and joked sometimes and never indicated any sadness nor did he seem to appreciated the endless hours his mother had worried over his fate during the dark days of World War II.  To the best of my knowledge he died an unbeliever.


     The morning of the funeral Mr. Bender returned with his long black hearse and the casket was slowly carried from the house.  My mom and her two sisters broke down in the most painful grief and tears at that moment.  I recall the funeral service at our church, even the blue hat that the pastor's wife wore as she and her husband sang a duet:  "Near To The Heart Of God".  I do not recall what was said but here in a notebook of family history beside me is the actual sermon outline that Pastor Robert Collitt used.  His text was the twenty-third Psalm and he concluded by pressing upon all those assembled this question: "do you know the Shepherd".   He always made the Gospel very clear as well as the need to personally receive the Lord Jesus as Savior.  Fifteen years later while preparing for a funeral at the church where he was then serving in Maryland he found this sermon outline and sent it to my mother.  I treasure it greatly.  To the best of my knowledge my grandmother had been a believer but my grandfather never responded to the Gospel until he was on his death bed seven years later. 


     As we filed past the casket for the last time, a cousin of mine said, "take a good look Russell; that is the last time you will see her".   At eight years of age I knew nothing about the Resurrection or the Scripture that said "we shall know even as we are known" but somehow I knew at that moment that my cousin was wrong!  In less than ten years after that funeral I, by the Grace of God, would be standing behind that pulpit and other pulpits and explaining what the Scriptures say about being absent from the body and present with the Lord; "that it is appointed unto man once to die and after that the Judgment"; and that in Christ I can stand before the Creator of the Universe in a perfect righteousness.


     I have seen several posts on social media about being sensitive to grieving, lonely people at Christmas time.  If such a person reads this or any of my social media posts I sincerely and deeply hope they will send a personal message to me.  I learned at eight years of age something of what they are facing.  "May our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and God our Father, who loved us and by His grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope, encourage your hearts and strengthen you in every good deed and word."  I Thess. 4:16&17