It started out a while back.

She stopped wanting to eat.

She stopped sleeping.

She had this wracking cough – horrible to hear, worse to see, as her frail body convulsed and she gasped for air.

Night sweats followed, as did the complete lack of interest in continuing to live.

She lost weight.

Her children came…meetings  were had, tempting meals were made, final decisions were legalized. 

And then she perked up.  She got better.  She reacted to the meds and the attention.  Things looked better.  A little more time was stolen.

On Monday she was put on oxygen full time.  I haven’t been to her house to see.  In my mind’s eye, I see the image of my grandfather, tethered to an oxygen hose that was long enough to reach from his bedroom, to his chair in the living room, and into the kitchen.  He would walk a few feet at a time, stop to rest, and continue on…a pale image of the rugged man he once was.  A pale image of the grandfather, cigarette in hand, who had stepped in and been the only real father figure I knew growing up.

Now she has the same sentence.  Oxygen, at all times.  She didn’t want to leave her house before – too much hassle, and too easy to sit in her chair, reading or watching tv. 

On Friday, a different call.

Lung cancer.  She has lung cancer.  She doesn’t know yet.  The call was courtesy of my mother, who has medical POA, and also works with the doctor she saw.  So no timeline yet, no difficult conversation with my her yet, but the rest of the family knows.

Ironically, my grandfather never had lung cancer.  60 + years of smoking, and he died of emphysema and COPD.  It was a horrific death…his lungs collapsed on several occasions, and the chest tube to help them reinflate was horribly painful for him.  In the end, that was what led to his death – he refused to have it done again.  He made them let him slip away – the opposite lung unable to compensate.

I can’t help thinking how he would feel…to know the woman he was married to for 49 years is dying of lung cancer.  She never smoked – and sure, there are lots of ways to get lung cancer, particularly when you grew up in the generation that found out a little too late that asbestos was bad. 

But let’s face it.  She was around his smoking every day for 49 years.  What are the odds?

And so the bumpy road begins.  When my mother and I talked yesterday, I was too in shock to take in her emotional state.  My husband immediately asked how mom was doing – and I realized my insensitivity.  I called her, and immediately asked  how she was.  She instantly broke down in tears.  There she was, not my mom in that moment, just another woman facing the death of HER mommy.  She is terrified of the suffering she knows is coming.  She is a respiratory therapist…she sees this every single day.  She doesn’t want her mother to go through that.

But this is the road we are on.

My grandmother mused a few months ago, when this was initially starting to happen…what if she didn’t hear God’s voice after she dies?  We’ve struggled with that – was it a statement of lack of faith?  Was it just a silly musing?  Is she really worried? 

As one younger in the faith, in a family where we are all firmly convinced we know the correct answer and everyone else is wrong, I’ve been hesitant to ask her.  She has her own image she wants me to see…one firmly and unwaveringly faithful…a life given to Christ at the age of 9…but I don’t know.

She’s my grandma, and this is going to be a rough road.  My mother had projected, before this diagnosis, that Thanksgiving was unlikely…Christmas EXTREMELY unlikely.  And I don’t know.  I don’t know what that looks like.  I know our family (Extended) has decreased in closeness quite distinctly since my grandfather died.  I know it will be worse when my grandmother goes.

So I mourn her life light dimming, and I mourn what is to come.  I mourn my family, and the end of traditions that were a mainstay of my life growing up. 

We can make new traditions, as difficult as that seems.

But my grandma…not being part of them…I just don’t know how that goes.

I need to get caught up on my Financial Peace postings (I am missing the deals lesson, the lesson on investing, and the lesson on saving for retirement and college). But…

Our junior high and high school students at church have a mission “trip” (they are staying here in town, but doing service projects for a week) begins Sunday. I did 1/2 of the shopping today with one of the admins for the youth groups. Pushing those giant flat bed carts around Sam’s, loaded down with tons of cases of gatorade, tons of lbs of lunch meat, and various other things I need for the upcoming weeks’ meals was…just…HARD! I am so tired, and my I ache from my hands up to my shoulders! (whine whine whine!!)

I am excited, and also quite nervous about the upcoming week. The food I am making is considerably less complex than anything my husband cooks, so I know I CAN do it…I’m just afraid of messing up! (My life story!)

In other news – after watching the documentary Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead, Hubs and I are going to attempt going on a juicing fast for awhile….I am scared!

You know, they always say “it’s the little things in life that make it worth living”.   I don’t know who “they” are, but I get it.  The times when my husband stops to pick up chocolate covered strawberries on his way home, just because he knows it will make my day, the way Pez can get BonBon to laugh uproariously by making silly faces and noise, or the times when my kids just come over and give me a hug for no reason in particular…those are the small things that just make life awesome.

The bad thing is, it’s also the little things that can trip you up.

This week, and last week, and the week before, the thing that has tripped me up is the inability to find our 3-hole punch.  Seriously.  I decided a couple of weeks ago that I was really going to get on the ball again.  (hahaha!)  I printed off household management documents (menu planning, organizing, goal setting), and got all geared up to fill them out and put them in a binder.  (Ren’s sister would refer to this as a CONTROL JOURNAL.  Because I am a reformed “control freak”, I can’t call it that.  So we’ll just call it my little household binder.  MLHB for short.)  I was all motivated.  I was thinking of everything I wanted to write down, all my goals, all my menu plans…it was going to be AWESOME!

No 3-hole punch.

No way to put all my little organizational papers into MLHB!

Instead, all the paperwork has just been sitting here, unloved and not filled out, hanging like a cloud over my head.  It has also been cluttering up my dining room as it sits in the stack of unloved papers I don’t know what to do with.  Intellectually, I REALIZE that I can still fill everything out.   I could probably even get rid of a lot of the rest of “unloved papers” if I would get on the ball with this.

The lack of my 3-hole punch has paralyzed me!

I realized, thinking about it, that there are a lot of times in life when I let the little things get in the way of me accomplishing everything I set out to do.  Whether it’s housework piling up, Bible reading, praying, or even working on my relationship with my husband…there are far too many times when I have let something small get in the way of handling what really needs to be done.

We officially made the decision to homeschool Pez.  I’ve got the paperwork filled out, I just need to make some copies, get some things notarized, and send it off.  Making this change is going to require an overhaul of how we do almost everything around our house on a day-to-day basis.  It means a new schedule, new organizational requirements as I have to keep records of our homeschooling, and it means I need to take care of all those things I let slide far too often that will get in the way of me focusing on educating.

I just have to stop letting the 3-hole punch be the sucker punch to our success.

(Seriously, I could have saved myself all that hassle for $9???  Which I could actually get for free since I have Max Perks credit? There are moments when I am actually not terribly bright.  Shhhhh…don’t tell my husband.)

I’ve had a lot of posts bubbling around in my head the last few weeks.  And I guess the problem is, they’re stuck bubbling.  I have things I want to write about, and then I sit down to write them, and I just get so verbose I end up scrapping the whole deal.  One of the things I have wanted to write about though, is my daughters, prayer, and my mother-in-law.

It will come as no shock to my husband, should he read this, that his mother and I have a bit of a…well…standoffish relationship.  I think she’s thankful I am married to her son, I am greatful she gave birth to my husband, and I think we’re both happy we’re about a 17 hour drive from each other.  And that my mother in law doesn’t fly. 

It’s not that she and I have a huge animosity toward each other – we don’t.  At least, there isn’t much animosity on my side.  It’s just…she has some trouble respecting boundaries, and I don’t do everything the way she thinks I should.  She also thinks I’m a perfectionist, and I resent the fact that she doesn’t know me well enough to realize – SOOOOOOOO not demanding perfection in my household.  LOL.  (That’s actually laughable.) 

Wow, I descended into the bitter there for a second, didn’t I.

Not where I’m going with this post.

When my brother and sister-in-law got married back in January, her parents stood up, as did several of their relatives and close friends, and they talked about how they used to pray for my sister-in-law’s future husband.  Before they ever new him.  Before she was ever old enough to marry.  They were praying for her future husband.  They were praying for the man he would be when they met.

To be clear, my brother was just…NOT that great of a prize.  He’s a great guy.  He’s handsome, good personality, smart, etc.  But – when he met my SIL, he had just divorced his first wife.  He had three very young daughters.  The divorce itself was NASTY.  Awful.  horrible.  My brother was left financially destroyed, emotionally destroyed, and…well…everything he was had fallen apart.

Shortly after meeting my brother, my SIL (whom he wasn’t even dating at the time) gave him a Bible.  Now – my brother was raised the same as I was.  He went to church and Sunday school every week, Wednesday night programs, etc.   He was confirmed into the church at 14.  After that, my mother quit making him go, so he didn’t really go anymore.  As he grew older, he lived a party lifestyle.  He drank a lot, partied ALL THE TIME, and started to focus on the material things in life.  Somehow, around that Bible, my brother’s life changed.  He became the man God intended for him to be.  Or, perhaps he’s still on the way, but the journey has started.

As I look at my own children, I think about my own relationship with my mother-in-law.  I have started praying for their future spouses, and the families of those spouses.  I see now, at the ripe age of 36, how important that family will be to my children.  As they join our family with their new family, either we can have synergy, or we can have strife.  I am praying for the synergy.  I am praying my daughters’ mother-in-laws will be a second mother to my daughters, not someone they stress about being around.  I am praying my daughters’ father-in-law will be a man they can honor and respect.  I am praying the families my grandchildren are born into will be life-giving, faith building, loving, affirming families.

I didn’t see how important that was in the past.  I always thought my mother was just being an annoying snoop when she would ask about my boyfriends’ families, and then immediately pass judgement on them as unacceptable.  I understand now, the importance.  I understand what COULD be…both good and bad…if my children don’t find the right spouse.

We’ve got awhile before it’s a concern…but that’s ok…I’ve got a good while for God to mold my future sons and daughters  in law into the people God needs them to be.  Who knows what they’re going through right now – but just as God worked in my brother’s life, I pray He will work in theirs.