Clara’s Lesson
Her lesson was given when I was
about five or six years old. One night,
I was visiting with my older sister as we fell asleep. She was telling me about my father’s mother,
a grandmother who I never got to know. I
asked what it meant that our grandmother had “died,” and that’s why I’d never
get to see her. As my sister tried to
convey the concept of death to me, I realized death looked like the baby robins
that fell out of trees onto the sidewalk.
As we continued our visit, something awful dawned on me, and I asked her
if our Siamese cat, Mr. Stubbs, would die.
Yes, he would, someday. My
thoughts jumped from Mr. Stubbs to my grandparents, Adolph and Marie, and yes,
someday they would die, too. Intense
fear set it. I couldn’t imagine life
without them. The fear deepened: Would
Mom and Dad die? Yes, sooner or
later. Then the big one: Would I
die? Yes, sooner or later.
That did it. Sobbing hysterically, I ran downstairs to the
dining room, where Mom sat on a couch, reading, and taking notes for the
college classes she was taking. Once I
was able to catch my breath and verbalize, I asked her if we were all going to
die someday. She calmly told me, yes,
but not for a long, long, long time.
During that long time, I would learn many things that would lead me into
my forever life, my eternal life, and when the time came, I would go into it without
fear because of what I was learning in Sunday School. Her
words soothed me. Learning the way to
heaven would help me to do something about this dilemma called death, something
all of us will have to deal with someday.
My mother’s lesson is profound
in its simplicity. It touches on faith in
the infinite Power of Love to take us beyond our timebound lives into our safe
eternal home. Mother believed, and now
as the goldenrod turns yellow and a new schoolyear begin, she has entered the
Kingdom of Eternal Love.
