The Pearl

When my gramma left this earth and all her belongings behind, my aunty gave me one of her necklaces. Its really just one small pearl on a cheap, discoloured, metal chain with a tiny chip of a diamond you can barely see.

Every time I attach it around my neck I get a little homesick ache in my throat, and images cascade through my mind – a warm sunlit day with Gram bent over weeding between the potato plants in her massive garden. Sitting beside her on a small wooden bench in her tiny, but bright, attic room, watching her thread the needle in her sewing machine. In the kitchen folding dough with her while she showed me how to push it through a circle of thumb and finger to make buns. Sitting down at the table with Cafe-Lib and a bowl of porridge between her and grampa, reading from the Daily Bread devotional in the mornings before he headed out to the fields.

When I fiddle with the delicate clasp I can see my grampa clearing land and building fence by hand, until his palms were as rough as sandpaper and full of grit. I see them both, planting every spring and feeding cows throughout the winter, pulling calves, losing cows, building barns and haysheds and losing them to fire and wind. I see them digging their feet in, scraping by and saving through the good years and the bad. Giving away as much of their bank account as they could to missionaries across the world that were doing the “real” work of helping those who needed. As I slide that little pearl back and forward over my skin, I wander sleepily past their room and find them getting down on their knees beside their bed on the old red and black diamond patterned rug, holding each other’s hands and praying in soft murmurs for all their kids and grandkids. This pearl may be a small thing, not worth anything to anyone else, but when I put it around my neck it feels like all those images slip into my heart beneath it. And with all those memories comes this invisible building; an old church; a sanctuary. Because that’s what gramma and grampa were building. Their life, their farm wasn’t about profit – it wasn’t even about loss. It was about family and endurance, and most importantly about the way to find joy in all the things that don’t carry a monetary value. Building a sanctuary in a beautiful valley where all their kids were welcome and all their other non-related kids too. Where the question of God was never a question but always a grateful certainty. Where every worry and hard thing was prayed over and given up to a higher shoulder. Every time I slip that little pearl around my neck it’s like having gramma’s hand on my shoulder reminding me.

As a teenager and all through my twenties I struggled with gram. I loved her to pieces but she was so caught up in the rules of religion, so afraid of anything that looked different than what she thought Christianity should be that I stopped trying to connect with her. Whether it was from her upbringing in a strict mennonite type of environment or a Victorian-esque belief based on a God who’s wrath was all mixed up with his love… I don’t know… one day she’ll tell me about it. But she had a hard time seeing her own worth; she focused on her sins a lot. I rolled my eyes and shrugged my shoulders and winced at the behaviour quotes she would put in all my birthday cards. Cards that I cherish now. Even as I still wince at some of the quotes. She gave me a book once, that made me furious. She thought it would help make me a good wife – I think I always leaned a little bit too far towards feminism for her comfort. It was in those years that I lost sight of her mischievous side, her jokes and water fights and games and amazing made up stories about the circus. Her adventures and love of the outdoors and all things beautiful in creation. The delight she always expressed to see me. Her little squeal of joy when we ran into each other in town or at family gatherings, the way she would scrunch her eyes closed and hug me as tight as her bad shoulder would allow her to. I miss all those pieces of her now, would do anything to have tea and plum jam on a bun with her one more time.

The weeks before Gramma left us were long and hard. She broke her hip, she went through surgery, her teeth were rotten so she could hardly eat, she started to lose her thoughts to dementia, she had small heart attacks. She felt useless. She wanted, always, desperately, to go see Grampa. To go home to her God. But she lingered instead. Waiting.

It was a trek I didn’t think was fair. Like slogging through mud. The end, with its relief, kept disappearing over the horizon. There was more than one phone call saying, “I think she’s going, you’d better come.” And we’d gather close, hug, and kiss her forehead, hold her hand and sing her songs, pray with her and read verses from the soft leatherbound Bible that she’d used so much it was in pieces. I only got the outside bits of that slog; my aunties bore the brunt of that awful march of time. But I felt it.

Near the beginning of it, my sister would text and say “I’m praying she goes home today.” And I felt the same. Why did she need to be stuck in limbo, here but not, unable to communicate with us, unable to eat or do any of the things she was so fiercely independent about? But when I turned to Jesus with it, ready to tell him to do something, to think I should have a say, he turned a wide stance and stood between me and Gram. “It’s not your business.” He told me. “It’s between me and her. She’s mine.”

I was shocked, so much so that I reared back, surprised at the fierceness of his tone, a little bit hurt at the protectiveness in his stance, how he wouldn’t let me past. It’s not something that happens very often between him and I. I didn’t know what to say, but I mulled it over.

I don’t know what happened between him and her during those long days and nights. It’s easy to lose faith in him and think she suffered in the dark of it, stripped of her dignity and intelligence like an animal, without comfort. But there’s this phrase that keeps coming to me from a song we sang near the end. An old hymn that starts like this: “Come thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace, streams of mercy never ceasing call for songs of loudest praise… here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by thy help I come…”

I have never heard that term before; I couldn’t get it out of my head and it stuck there for weeks and weeks. For some odd reason I thought of it as a deep Southern type of phrase – like a flag raised during the civil war in the states by men who fought through starvation and terror and all kinds of bad things to top a hill and claim it. But when I went to look it up, lo and behold I found it was from an ancient story about the Philistines, golden tumors, rats, and a stolen ark returned – kind of like an Indiana Jones movie. To make it short, the ancient group had finally gotten back their ark, and had gathered in softness; in gratitude; in vulnerabilty – exposing themselves as they sought the God they’d forgotten about. And their enemies surrounded them, thinking to make an easy conquest.

Ebenezer is two words put together meaning a stone built; and protection, being surrounded by and given aid/sanctuary. It was something like saying “God fought for us all the way to this place here.”

I still feel conflicted over Gramma’s death. I still get angry sometimes if I let myself. I know many others who would doubt that it was anything more than biology and a fading body. I can hear the cynic in my head telling me not to read into it, not to put something spiritual there when I could clearly see the laboured breathing and the starvation. Where I could feel the emptiness of the room. I don’t want to be that fake person who uses spiritual platitudes to cover unpleasant and uncomfortable moments in time.

But then that phrase from that old hymn pops in my head. That idea of raising an Ebenezer. And that moment with Jesus pops in my head, where he turned so fiercely protective and wouldn’t let me see past his shoulder. And then I think, maybe. Maybe Jesus was fighting for her right to the last second. Maybe he was doing something in that in-between time to help her shed her walls and her rules and her worry that she wasn’t good enough for him. Maybe something was happening in her spirit that I couldn’t see, that she didn’t even see but only let happen. Maybe like the small pearl on my necklace Gramma’s spirit was being shined up and turned into a treasure without price.

Doubt is easy. Like slipping into a pair of worn out slippers.

Faith is much harder. Having faith in my Favourite Being when something doesn’t make sense to me and I can’t sit down to ask him what he’s doing is still, at forty something, surprisingly difficult. But. Gram’s whole life was about raising an Ebenezer. She would want me to know Jesus was fighting for her all the way to and at the end. I know when I get to see her, she will cry about it when she tells me one day. And when I look at him now, as he still blocks me from seeing what he’s doing with her, I can see in his eyes that look. That one that says he’ll do the same for me one day. That he’ll guard my path just as fiercely. Keep it a secret between him and I. Because my soul is his. When that happens I hope those I love will know to raise an Ebenezer there.