grief

Faithfully Thinking: Eating Watermelon with Shirley

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 15 Comments

A friend of our family, of mine, died last Thursday.



I was already having a bit of a down day and struggling with a lot of memories and feelings from past events when I received the news that Shirley had died.

How dare Shirley die on one of those down days I have from time to time. Yes, I can say that with the utmost sarcasm, knowing that it would have cracked Shirley up if she heard me say it.

Shirley and I could exchange sarcastic retorts affectionately and easily anytime we were together, no matter how long it had been since we’d seen each other.

Her youngest daughter, Denise, and I have been friends since I was probably six or seven.

We visited the Davis family often when I was growing up and there was even a short time they lived with us, pitching their teepee in our backyard. Poor Gary, Shirley’s son, was the one who had to tell me when my 14-year-old dog died. My dad had gone to work and my mom was too emotional, if I remember correctly.

When I am down or feeling off kilter emotionally, I turn on either The Andy Griffith Show or The Dick VanDyke Show and on the day I heard Shirley died, I chose Dick VanDyke. I didn’t look at what the episode was about, I just clicked on it. I need laughter, and I needed it quickly.

The episode was entitled “Never Name A Duck.”

It was about Rob Petry, the main character, bringing home two baby ducks and Laura saying they couldn’t keep the ducks but then their son Richie saw the ducklings and begged to keep them. Rob and Laura agree but, sadly, the one duck, Oliver, dies. Stanley, the other duck, lives into adulthood but Laura and Rob notice one day that he is starting to look sick, similar to how Oliver did before he died.

Rob takes the duck to a vet and comes home without him.

Laura and Richie think Stanley has died, but Rob tells them he didn’t die; Rob just released him into a lake to be with other ducks because he was slowly dying in captivity. He didn’t belong in a human house. He belonged in nature with other ducks. It was what the vet suggested.

Richie is absolutely devastated and screams that if Stanley can’t live there, he doesn’t want to live there either. He runs from the living room, to his bedroom and slams the door.

Rob follows him and they have a heart-to-heart. He tells Richie he knows it hurts, but that by making Stanley stay in their home they were actually being selfish. Stanley was sad in their house. He needed to be with other ducks and in nature. That was his real home.

He asked Richie if he would want to take his goldfish out of its bowl and lay it on his pillow next to him at night.

“No,” Richie says tearfully.

“Why?” Rob asks.

“Because he’d die out of water,” Richie responds.

Rob explains that this was what was really happening to Stanley. He was slowly dying in their house.

In a similar way, we humans don’t belong on earth. Not really. This is not our ultimate home and we Christians believe our body is also temporary- a shell to hold our spirit or soul.

As Rob had this conversation with Richie, I immediately thought of Shirley.


Much like Richie didn’t want to let go of his duck, and I didn’t want to let go of my aunts and uncles and my grandparents and won’t want to let go of my parents one day, I don’t want to let go of Shirley.

I want Shirley here with us.

I want to hear her laughter and see her mischievous smile.

I want to watch her eat a whole watermelon drowned in salt.

I want to hear her preach again about the goodness of God despite all her family went through.

I want to hear her saying, “Oh, shut up, you” when I one-up her on the sarcasm level.

I want to hear her tell my parents, again, how much she loves them.


I have what Rob Petrh called selfish-love.

“I love Shirley. I want her here, so am I really being selfish?” I asked myself that day when I thought about this connection.

The answer that came to mind was, yes, I am selfish because Shirley is worshipping Jesus now.

She’s in his arms. Tom, her husband, and her children, Gary and Mechelle, are with her. They have surrounded her, and they are having what my family calls a group hug right now — a very long, very overdue group hug.

One day, a very, very long time from now, Denise will join them, so it is up to all of us to give Denise group hugs here on earth until God chooses to take her home.

It is selfish of me to want Shirley to leave all that beauty, all that glory, all that all-encompassing love and come back to all this pain and sadness here on earth.

She is where she was meant to be, created to be. Earth was never her permanent home, and it is not ours.



I once heard a story about a very young girl dying of cancer and shortly before she died, she took her mom’s hand and said, “Don’t worry, Mom. Heaven is closer than you think.”

Heaven is closer than we all think which means Shirley is also closer than we think.

Shirley is home, her real home, with her family and more importantly her creator. That home is also our home when we ask Jesus to forgive our sins and become our savior.

Shirley would want you to form a personal relationship with Jesus because she wants you there with her. Don’t make her eat all that watermelon on her own.

When it is time for you to leave this temporary home, when God decides it is your time, Shirley and Jesus are waiting for you.

They’ve left a seat for you, for all of us, at the table.



Saturday Afternoon Chat: Teaching my kids about Whitney Houston and a shared moment with strangers

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 18 Comments

Good afternoon! Care for a cup of tea?

Which one would you like to try?

Simply Cinnamon Apple?

Salted Caramel?

Peppermint Bark?

Pumpkin Spice?

I personally liked the peppermint bark, but not as much as plain peppermint.

The last couple of days we have been celebrating Little Miss as she turned 11 on Thursday. We didn’t mean to celebrate her for four days but that’s how it worked out because activities we wanted to do with her were spread out a bit.

On Thursday she wanted to have pancakes at a diner downtown so her brother and I took her down. She had chocolate chip pancakes and a fresh fruit cup. The owner sang happy birthday to her.

The diner was decorated very nicely for fall. This diner always does a very nice job at decorating, from what I understand, but I have only visited there twice. My dad and son have visited there more.

After breakfast, we hung out at home for a bit and then Little Miss and I headed to my parents’ for some pizza and to celebrate her birthday with them.

We played a board game called Aggravation and Little Miss won (with a little help from Grandma and me this time, but usually she wins outright on her own). What was funny was my dad was going to play but sat down in his room for a few minutes and drifted off to sleep. I decided I would play for him and for myself until he woke up, but in the end, he didn’t wake up until the game was almost over.

Dad usually wins at this game, and he almost won this time, even though he was asleep. He was three spots from winning when my mom sent him home again because she didn’t have any other moves she could make.

After we played board games, Little Miss had an animal club meeting on Zoom and then she went home and rode bikes with her brother and then …. Yes, there is more… they watched two Disney movies. She really wrung every last minute out of her birthday and crashed pretty hard that night.

The Husband had to work on her birthday but yesterday he took the day off and we all went out to dinner at a nice restaurant and then they all went in Walmart to pick out a new dog bed and a gifts for the dog because that is what Little Miss wanted to do for her birthday. She also picked out a gift for her friend who is coming for a sleepover today because that little girl’s birthday was this past Monday.

I stayed in the car due to a sore leg and read my book. It was very cozy.

Tomorrow we are headed to a reptile zoo called Reptileland because Little Miss loves reptiles.

We are already fairly tired from celebrating already. By tomorrow night The Husband and I will be virtually comatose. We will be this way because we are, as Little Miss has reminded us a few times this week — old.

She’s been watching YouTube Shorts making fun of life in the 1990s and early 2000s and asking us if that is what it was really like “back then.”

It is hard to accept those years are so long ago, so I just pretend they aren’t and ignore her. Ha!

To show how old I am and how I have failed at educating my children about the 1990s — I learned yesterday that neither of them knew who Whitney Houston was. They sort of rolled their eyes when I mentioned her. There was some meme that mentioned her and my almost 19-year-old son said, “I don’t even know who that is.”

I was horrified and pulled up YouTube to educate them. They did recognize “I Want to Dance With Somebody” and “I Will Always Love You,” but I also made them watch her doing the Star Spangled Banner and The Boy was blown away.

“Okay, yeah, she was amazing,” he told me.

I went to tell him how she threw her life away and it was so heartbreaking to me and started to cry. She shouldn’t have died so young. No matter her talent and her beauty, she never seemed to feel worthy enough to enjoy her life of happiness and health and that always broke my heart. Now all we have left of her is her music and memories and we should have had her for so much longer.

Thank God we still have her friend and my favorite female singer CeCe Winans.

I am going to have to show them videos of CeCe this week too.

Earlier in the week I saw a beautiful sunset and even though I’m having an issue with my sciatica and leg, I made it outside to take a photo. While I was there, two guys (probably about my age) riding bikes came by our house. We do have some bike or foot traffic on our street but it is a back street so we don’t as often as some streets.

I was startled a little by them but had to laugh when the one guy looked at the sunset, pumped his fist and yelled out “’Merica!”

The other guy, with a shirt or something wrapped around the top of his head, looked up at me smiling and said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

I said it was, and they kept going while smiling and left me smiling.

Later, Erin (Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs) told me she thought it was cool that we’d had that shared moment together. I hadn’t thought of it that way, and her comment made me think.

After weeks of anger, hatred, and just all out sadness in the world, it was nice to have that shared moment of joy while admiring a gorgeous sunset.

The photos do not do it justice.

How about you?

How was your week last week? Anything exciting coming up for this week?

Saturday Evening Chat: Meeting fellow bloggers, no link party here, and flowers are blooming

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 18 Comments

Hello! Good Saturday evening. This was supposed to go up this afternoon, but life got busy so it got delayed.

Sit down and have some tea and a snack with me. My sister-in-law sent a whole bunch of tea with my brother when he visited last week so I have a variety for you to choose from. A honey ginger tea, green tea with lemon, Earl Gray, one for relaxation (I may ten cups of that tonight!), and a couple of others. And, of course, I have my go-to, plain peppermint.

First, a bit of housekeeping:

This post will no longer be a link party. Why? Because there are so many link parties out there already that I am a part of or participate in and they are great. And because I like my Saturday posts just to be a chat post with my blog followers.

If you are looking for a link party to participate in, I co-host one with three lovely blogger ladies that goes live on Thursday nights. The Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot goes live about 9:30 p.m. each Thursday (unless I’m late like this week. Whoops!) and if you scroll on my right-hand sidebar you should find the link to the latest one.

I also have added a link to parties I participate in at the top of my page.

I am going to leave up my monthly link-up for all things book-related. You can find a link to the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea link party at the top of my page.

With all of that out of the way, on to today’s post which will be about pretty much nothing. Ha!

No, it will be about something. I did actually do a few things this past week.

One very exciting something I did this past week was meet the blogger at Mama’s Empty Nest this past week. I don’t know if she shares her first name on her blog or not, since I’ve never seen her do it, so I won’t share it here. I’ll just call her C.

Over the years, I have loved reading C’s stories about her various trips across our country or into Canada. I have also been blessed and encouraged by the posts she shares about her faith. She’s hit a bit of a snag with her blog lately because WordPress says she is almost out of storage space and is trying to force her to upgrade. She likes to share photos from her various travels, so this has created quite the conundrum for her. and I am about in the same boat. The snag has led to her taking a bit of a break from her blog while she tries to reduce what’s in her storage. It’s also led to her and I both feeling like Wordress stinks a bit as a blog host.

C and her husband are trying to travel to each county in the state of Pennsylvania in the next few years. They are from the western part of Pennsylvania and I am in the East so they were able to mark a few more counties off their list this week, including mine.

C was also able to mark off seeing yet another covered bridge, which is another goal of hers. We have a beautiful covered bridge about 20 minutes from us that is located next to one of our favorite restaurants, so I suggested that as our meeting place. It let C check off two of her goals in a row — visiting another county and seeing a covered bridge.

Of course, they actually did see our county on their way through to visit Williamsport in Lycoming County. They were even able to see our county’s one stoplight in the middle of the town I live in. How terribly exciting for them. Ha!

The Husband had a later-than-planned day of work that day and The Boy wasn’t feeling well, so in the end it was just Little Miss and I who met with them. We were excited to introduce them to our local Philadelphia cheesesteak place. The restaurant is owned by someone who is originally from south Philadelphia. There are a variety of different ways to make a cheesesteak in Philadelphia and Big Mike (the restaurant owners) offers it a few different ways. C and her husband had never tried a cheesesteak with cheese whiz so they were excited to try one.

We had a nice dinner of cheesesteaks and chicken salads, sweet potato fries, and fried pickle chips, sitting on the picnic tables by the restaurant, overlooking the Loyalsock Creek and the Forksville Covered Bridge.

Little Miss is very shy around her peers and tends to open up more to adults at times. She usually opens up more when she gets to know a person, but for some reaso,n she connected immediately with C and her lovely husband.

C said later, maybe it is because they gave off “cool grandparent vibes” and Little Miss had to agree.

C and her husband have four grandchildren, one of them Little Miss’s age, and from what I have read on her blog, they really are the cool grandparents.

Little Miss loved sharing all kinds of stories with them and showing them photos of a range of pets and people from her life. She also enjoyed feeding the birds and a chipmunk hopping around the outside tables.

After filling our bellies and chatting, C and her lovely husband were back on the road again, with plans to leave the next day for home. Before leaving C gifted me with a box of Amish Inn Mysteries books after she read on my blog that I have been reading them. I’d take a photo of them to post here but they are in the back of my car, which isn’t here at the moment since  my husband is using it to pick up a friend of Little Miss’s for a playdate.

I am not including photos of myself here, even though we took a photo together, because I don’t enjoy photos of myself, but here is a lovely photo of the covered bridge.

C and I met on Wednesday. On Thursday I went to my parents to help clean and ended up chatting the afternoon away with the wife of a man who came to purchase some old collector bottles from my dad.

My grandmother collected bottles for years and also won awards for her collection. Those bottles are still at my parents but with them getting older and me not having room for the collection my dad is beginning to sell them off.

It will be hard to let them go but there simply isn’t any way to keep everything.

On Friday, the kids and I had to stop at two government offices for various reasons and pick up groceries. It was a frustrating day in many ways and that really isn’t a surprise since the previous sentence included the words, “government offices.”

I believe frustration is the main feeling you end up with after dealing with government offices. That and anger. Sometimes even rage  — especially when those offices have new rules every time you walk in the door.

One week they allowed us to use certain documentation to obtain a replacement social security card for our son and two weeks later they denied us the ability to do the same for our daughter. I truly feel that government employees either don’t actually know the rules, don’t care about the rules, or change the rules every time a new person comes in just to make their own, mundane life more exciting.

We did come home with what The Boy needed from his government office visit, but not what Little Miss needed.

After we came home, I tripped over a shovel in our garage and fell hard on my hands and needs on the concrete floor. I landed on both knees but more so the knee which had only just healed up from a fall on our sidewalk last summer.

There are many reasons I hate summer, and I can add falling on my face at least once during the season to that list now, apparently.

I actually didn’t fall right on my face, but close to it.

I bent my glasses, possibly cracked my phone (I found that crack later in the evening), and was left with a very bruised knee. Despite all that, I feel very lucky. Usually, a fall like that leaves me very, very sore the next day and could have left me with a broken bone, but I’m doing fairly well today. The knee isn’t feeling too great, but it isn’t as painful as it was last year when I twisted it.

While I was sitting and trying to recover from my fall, my mom called and said my dad was having chest pains that were radiating to his back so The Husband ran out the door and drove him to the ER. Dad refused an ambulance.

Because my mom has been having falls lately (luckily ones that have just left her on her bottom and not seriously injured), I headed over to stay with her, limping into the house. I left there at midnight after Dad had a clean-bill of health from the ER. They determined he had gas and a severe muscle pull.

This afternoon I had a Crafternoon with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and others. I am also not leaving my house for the next several days for my mental and physical health.

We are scheduled to have dangerous heat for the next four or five days and my nerves are a bit shot from yesterday. We already have a heat advisory in place. Humidity is supposed to be very high on top of temperatures in the low to mid-90s.

 Heat and I don’t mix well together. It bothers my asthma and other issues.

The roses outside my house bloomed in full force this week but are quickly falling off and will be gone by the end of the week most likely. I will miss them as they seem to be one of the few highlights for me in summer.

The rest of summer is a muggy, hot, yucky mess that leaves me not feeling good. This year we won’t have a pool at my parents because it has become too much for my dad and us to maintain. This is disheartening to both me and Little Miss because we enjoyed it so much.

 So there has been a mix of sadness and happiness going on in my neck of the woods lately.

How about you? How was your week last week?

I’d love to hear about it in the comments, or you can leave me a link if you have a weekly round up post of some kind.

Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.

You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

You can also find her on Instagram and YouTube.

Saturday Afternoon Chat: A nice birthday weekend, more cozies to read, and complex feelings after some news

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 15 Comments

This was a week of highs and lows. Thursday was my birthday and it was a nice and very relaxing day. We received some news early in the day, however, and even struggled with what kind of news it was since it was the passing of a family member we haven’t had contact with in years. It’s hard to know how to handle the death of someone who wasn’t very pleasant to know, was abusive to your husband, and then stopped communicating (which actually came as a blessing).

The weather was beautiful that day, though. I didn’t go anywhere. I read a book and wrote a little bit on the third Gladwynn book, and watched an old movie.

Yesterday we went out as a family for my birthday and it was another relaxing day with beautiful weather.

We went to lunch at a nice restaurant, visited a garden center, a library with a used bookstore, and then a playground and creek.

The garden center is decorated for fall with pumpkins and gourds lined up all over and flowers blooming in their garden.

Little Miss wanted a white pumpkin so she can paint it later so we picked up one of those for her and a natural soda for me.

We stumbled on to a shoe sale that we thought was next week, which was very exciting for us because it was an amazing sale and let us stock up on shoes for us and the kids. It derailed our trip to a Barnes and Noble, which is about two hours from our house (any Barnes and Noble stores are two hours from our house – in one direction or the other.)

 I haven’t visited a Barnes and Noble for probably 15 years and my husband was going to take me to one as a surprise. I decided it would be better to save gas money (it was another 45-minute drive) and buy the shoes instead. I didn’t know where The Husband was actually taking me but I had guessed maybe he’d found a Barnes and Noble near us so I told him I was okay if we didn’t visit it this time around.

The thing is, I wouldn’t have bought a lot of books anyhow because I rarely buy new books. I prefer to buy them used or on clearance. I’d rather get a few books for $10 than one for $15. It would have been nice to walk around the store, but now that I know there is one not super far away, we can find another time to go. Plus, we needed the shoes and there is a used bookstore in the library of the town we were already in so we went there and we brought home 15 books for less than $20.

Most of my books were cozy mysteries and Little Miss chose quite a few of them. I’ll share more about the books I picked out on my Sunday Bookends tomorrow since that’s where I usually talk books I’ve been reading or have added to my collection.

After we visited the bookstore and library, Little Miss wanted to try out her new water shoes at the creek so we spent about 45 minutes at a small park that also has access to a creek.

Earlier in the week Little Miss and I picked up her new glasses and the next day I took her to Kid’s Club, which is a program at a church near us, where she met her friend that she’d invited.

Little Miss loves her new glasses with multiple colors on the earpieces and pink along the rest of the frame.

We both enjoyed looking at the trees that had changed in the town where the optometrist is and I had to laugh because one of the trees is changing into a beautiful orange color that is matching the color of the car parked at the house it is next to.

Wednesday night Little Miss and her friend had fun at the church program while my friend (Little Miss’s friend’s mom) and I chatted together in the parking lot.

This weekend we are continuing to relax since The Husband doesn’t have to work for the first time in – I don’t know how long actually.

We plan to hang out and watch movies and one of us should probably wash some dishes since we played hooky from housework the last couple of days.

These days off came at a good time since the death in our family was my estranged mother-in-law. My husband wrote a bit about his relationship with her on his personal Facebook page but I have decided not to share that here.

The bottom line is that my mother-in-law was abusive mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically. She picked favorites out of her two children and you can take my word for it that my husband was not that child. She has not spoken to us in more than five years and lives several states away. In other words, this “loss” doesn’t feel much different than when she was alive.

It’s a complicated situation when a person loses a family member who wasn’t very kind. There is grief there but it’s different than the grief other people have. It’s partially a grief of what could/should have been and also grief of there being no closure or apologies for past hurts. In this situation that apology would most likely never have come thanks to mental illness on the part of my mother-in-law.

I wasn’t even sure how to feel and spent part of my birthday a bit numb and dazed. Should I grieve the woman who tried to manipulate me the way she did everyone else? Two days later, I still don’t how to answer that. I feel sadness for a woman who chose to have no relationship with her son or beautiful grandchildren – even when we lived less than a mile from her for many years before she moved, but I can’t honestly say I feel a sense of loss or grief. I feel guilty for that and I also feel odd admitting that, but it’s where I am right now.

I should be crying, shouldn’t I? I should be thinking back on fond memories or saying things like, “Sure she wasn’t nice at times but…”

Yet I have none of that to offer in this situation and it’s a surreal place for me to be.

It’s only happened one other time and in that case I could at least think of one or two really nice and genuine things the person did – while also wondering if any of it was real since so much lying was revealed at the end of that person’s life.

So moving on to my plans for the rest of the weekend as I navigate this weird headspace I am in.

I’m looking forward to working more on my book this weekend and on some reading.

Next week we don’t have any appointments scheduled so it will be mainly school and maybe a playdate at a local creek with a couple of friends.

The temperature is supposed to drop next week and I am looking forward to the fall-like weather. Yesterday’s 83-degree temps were not very welcome by me, even though it was a very beautiful day.

How was your week last week? I hope you found some time to relax and unwind. Let me know in the comments.

Because she would want us to

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 2 Comments

My aunt Dianne was sitting in her recliner bundled up in a thick sweater pulled over her plaid button-up shirt she’d been wearing almost every day for two months with a thick, fluffy blanket across her legs. A knitted shawl with a hood was draped around her head and shoulders.

She looked – as she might say herself – like a tick about to burst.

“Lisa, is that heat on?” she asked and when I assured her it was she shivered. “Well, good gravy, I don’t think it’s working.”

On the TV Ree Drummond was pouring half a quart of whipping cream into a bowl of potatoes and telling viewers “Now, don’t judge me, or judge me if you want, but I just think these mashed potatoes are so much better with all this whipping cream.” Then she smiled at the camera.

“I can’t believe she’s not 300 pounds,” I said.

“All that cream is a little overboard isn’t it?” Dianne asked, rhetorically.

We both knew it was overboard.

We laughed a little and shook our heads.

We watched The Pioneer Woman whip up the potatoes and set them aside.

“Now it’s time for my famous chicken fried steak, which cowboys just love,” Ree said and smiled at the camera again, dimples showing.

I rolled my eyes.

“How hasn’t anyone in that family had a heart attack?” I wondered out loud, the irony not lost on me since my aunt had had at least two heart attacks already. I hoped she didn’t take my comment as a personal jab at her.

“Well…..” Dianne said and shrugged a little, leaving the rest of her response to be guessed.

The Pioneer Woman drives me nuts with her fattening recipes but her chipper personality and knowing I can modify the recipes for a healthier option make looking away hard to do.

Next to me the Christmas tree was bright with lights and ornaments. Out the window Dad’s star was shining bright against the dreary winter clouds at the edge of the field and woods.

Before long my aunt was asleep in her chair, chin into her chest. She’d been falling asleep a lot like that lately, sometimes almost in mid-sentence, and I knew her health was getting worse. So that day we enjoyed her when she was awake and tried not to think about how much longer we might have her with us.

A couple weeks before she’d been messaging me, asking me for gift suggestions for my son and daughter and I knew she was anxious to spoil them and see them smile as they opened their gifts. She was planning how to make sausage balls, a Southern tradition, without “poisoning me”, knowing I was allergic to corn and had also gone gluten-free. I told her not to worry about me and simply make the treats for the rest of the family. I offered to make some as well so she wouldn’t have to do all the work. We messaged back and forth and then I accidentally bumped the video chat button in messenger. The button is annoying and most days I hate it because I rarely want to video chat with anyone, especially via Facebook. I missed her call but she tried to call me through the ap and her voice was recorded. It was only for 17 seconds,  enough for me to hear her voice call my name, thinking I’d picked up. I didn’t discover it for a couple months, when she was already gone.

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Sometimes, when I’m missing Dianne the most, I scroll back to the recording and listen to her call my name. Of course, I always cry. When I first discovered the recording I hit the play button without thinking. Her voice could be heard throughout our house and my son’s head lifted quickly. He looked at me in confusion and then we burst into tears.

My mom said many days Dianne could barely make it from the bathroom to her chair without needing to sit down and catch her breath but she sat the kitchen table for hours and made the sausage balls, kneading the meat and flour and cheese together and rolling them to put in the oven to be cooked.

“She just seemed so delighted she could do that,” Mom remembered one day when we were visiting. She grew quiet and I saw tears in her eyes. “Well, anyhow…” her voice trailed off and I knew she was trying to stay happy and not bring the mood of the day down.

On my phone is a video of my aunt opening a gift from her grand-nephew, my son. She could barely catch her breath, but she seemed excited and hugged him and told her how much she loved the gift.

Four days later my husband’s phone rang and I heard him from upstairs.

“No! Oh no!” I heard emotion heavy in his voice.

He came downstairs and held the phone against his chest.

“It’s your mom,” he said.

I didn’t want to take the phone but I did. I already knew.

“Dianne died,” Mom said in a voice mixed with sadness and shock.

She’d called my husband first to make sure someone was with me when I was told, just as she had when my grandmother had died 15 years before.

Though I knew it was coming, my head still spun when the words came out of my mom, and I had to sit in the floor because my legs didn’t seem to want to hold me.

I sat in my parents living room the other day.

The chair was empty.

The Southern accent couldn’t be heard.

I couldn’t kiss her soft cheek or try to squirm away when she blew “zerberts” (messy, slobbery kisses) against my cheek.

I couldn’t feel her arms around me or hear her laugh when one of the kids said something funny.

Somehow it feels a lot less like Christmas this year with her gone.

Still, I know she would scold us for dreading gathering without her.

So we’ve promised each other to cook the sausage balls, decorate the tree, wrap the gifts and to cook the collard greens I forgot to get her last Christmas, even though she asked.

We will drink hot cocoa while we watch her favorite Christmas movies: “It’s A Wonderful Life” and the black and white version of “A Christmas Carol.”

We will share the funny stories and laugh as we remember her.

We will, somehow, find the joy in the midst of sadness and enjoy those who are still with us because that is exactly what she would have wanted us to do.

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