Meghan

My friend Elisha invited me to her daughter's grave. She went yesterday and texted me from the site. She said that she would love for me to come with her sometime because it would be sort of like I could meet a part of her. She said, "kind of like how we like to show off our kids cause of how proud we are of them."

My heart swelled. I met Elisha a few years after her daughter had died and several years since mine had died. Our friendship met deep from the start as we bonded in sorrow and longing for our daughters in Heaven.

Today would have been her daughter's 18th birthday. There should have been 18 parties, 18 cakes, 18 candles, but the virus took her before she even saw her first.

Yesterday, before she went to her grave, she stopped at the cemetery gift shop. She says she rarely stops there, even though the people there are warm and they place nice music, there is a smell in the shop that is unsettling. She bought a small jar of oil and a dusting cloth and a handful of bright yellow daises. She said the flower petals reminded her of baby's slender fingers.

She told me how she knelt down in the grass, and with her finger, traced each letter of her daughter's name... Meghan Noelle Towles... She dusted the letters with the cloth and rubbed the oil deep into the stone until it shone in the sunlight. She wept heart-washing tears as she retrieved the water from the spout and placed the daises in the ground. She lay at the grave and told her daughter about good things...great things...how she and daddy were still married, still in love and how she had two more brothers now.

She told me that she thought it would make Meghan happy and proud to know that her family was still intact in this complicated old world.

It was noisy at the cemetery. There was construction going on just behind the hill near Mehgan's grave. But Elisha said she didn't mind, because the hammering and voices of the crewman were the sound of life happening.

This morning over coffee Elisha and I talked about Heaven. She said she would be lost without it.

We are all lost without it. It is where life is happening. Sure we get glimpses of it here, wonderful glimpses even, in our children, in friendship, in nature and in art.

But there is still so much darkness, so much death.

But in Heaven... Meghan is alive! All the babies are alive there...and they will never die. No one will ever die there, no more sorrow, no more death.

Imprinted on Meghan's gravestone are the words of Jesus, "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God."   

See God! Meghan sees God!

I can't even begin to grasp that.

But I can see it in Elisha's eyes, the quiet knowing of a mama that she will see her baby girl again. It's undeniable. So much of Elisha's spirit is so obviously trapped between this world and the next.

And maybe that's just where we are all supposed to be...