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Job 19:23-29

Reflect

My mom and stepdad had a fairytale romance. This photo was taken at Buttonwood Farms in Pennsylvania in 1975.

The battle was over. The race was run. The verdict was final, and it wasn’t an outcome that any of us wanted or truly accepted. The problem was that we had to. There was no alternative.

Mom was gone. There was no getting around it. Four days earlier, on July 30, she had taken her last breath with us gathered around her bed, and her spirit left her body and slipped into the Lord’s waiting arms. Now, on August 3, we stood around her grave and said our final goodbyes before the casket was lowered into the ground.

She had spent the last five of her 67 short years on Earth fighting a super aggressive form of breast cancer that simply refused to let go. Six weeks before the end she made the decision to quit fighting. The doctors only gave her six months at the most, and that was with a horrible and debilitating concoction of chemotherapy that would have left her sick and miserable the entire time. Instead, she retreated to her family and the confines of her home to live out whatever time she had left. And in those six weeks, she continued to pour herself into us and teach us a last few lessons about living and dying.

Before she was a wife and mother, Mom was a college sweetheart at the University of North Texas.

I could probably write dozens of reflections about that last month of her life, and maybe one day I will, but there is one moment that stands out the most to me. Mom told me that she had just found out from the doctors that it was official that that there were no more treatments available to help her. I responded with, “Well, I guess if we’re going to have a healing, we’ll need an old-fashioned Biblical miracle.” Mom turned her head slightly and her eyes softened. She said, “Honey, I don’t think that’s what the Lord is going to do this time. I think He has something else in mind.”

She knew. The end was coming, and she was embracing it. There’s no way she wanted to leave us, because she knew her passing was going to hit us like a brick wall — and it did. But she knew that she couldn’t escape it, so she faced it with the same dignity and class with which she had lived her life. Until her last breath she pointed all of us to the Savior who had defined most of her adult life.

The last portrait of my mother, taken less than a month before she passed on July 30, 2007.

Mom had a lot of “favorite” scriptures, because she loved the Bible and read it constantly. But two verses that I associate with her come from Job 19, and they were part  of the scriptures read at her funeral: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God…” (vs. 25-26) In spite of the frustration, fatigue and pain, Mom knew that there was another reality waiting for her on the other side. Even after the cancer had done its worst, she knew there would be something eternal within her that would allow her to pass to the other side to meet the Lord face-to-face.

Today, I still go to visit Mom’s grave whenever I’m in the Atlanta area, and my daughter is so wonderful for making sure that Mom’s tombstone has pretty flower arrangements throughout the year. But Mom isn’t there to enjoy them. She’s not only in “a much better place” — she’s in the best place of all enjoying things that are far too beautiful for us to comprehend. Because she embraced the Lord’s will and ways while she was on this planet, she now gets to embrace Him for eternity. And, more than anything, that’s the lesson she wanted to teach us all before she left.

Reflection copyright © 2022 Doug DeBolt.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.