When I was young one Summer my parents flew me down to California and I stayed with my Aunt and Uncle for awhile. She had a love affair with cemeteries and I believe she passed it on to me – we went walking through a few, had picnics there. Now as an adult, I love to walk through slowly, read the names and dates, and imagine their stories, the lives they lived; those sad ones cut too short, the epitaphs of a husband and wife married 60 years, buried together, soldiers draped in American flags, old men whose last relatives died before and left him alone. It relaxes me, honestly, and gives me hope that even after we leave, there are still others who can know you existed, if even just by name and in imagination; it honors the dead, I like to think so anyway.

There’s a beautiful hallowed ground near my house and I pass it often. I go walking there sometimes when I feel lonely, it comforts me somehow to be among those treasured so much their names are forever etched in stone, forgotten for a hundred years until a quiet barefoot woman slowly walks and says hello to a plot of earth and statues of angels made from cement.

In front of this cemetery, whomever owns the land has been building a memorial house, a funeral parlor, for … years. It sat unkempt and undone for as long as I’ve passed it – I first noticed it a long time ago. I’d say, about a year ago, construction resumed, and slowly I’ve noticed the facade being finished. It truly is a beautiful structure, magnificent with a copper dome and ornate tile work surrounding a big wooden double doorway. Flanked on either end by the sliding gates that rise and lower to receive the casket.

Each time we’d pass by I’d make a joke, but actually I meant it. I said, “when they finally finish that place it’ll be when I die, and I want my funeral there”. Because it sat, untouched for so long, I never imagined its completion would be when I turned forty. I’m not at all ready to die, so I ammend my previous declaration: My physical body is present, for at least another forty years, but indeed, when it is finished, I will have died, and I will be buried there.

Quite a declaration. I ponder that this season prepared me for this realization… and this death.

A part of me is dying. A life I lived for 4 decades is slowly departing from me, and I feel every last dying breathe of it as it goes. More recent still, the past twelve years, spent unable to love as well as I would have liked, wrapped in a protected shell of self, and ego, and a righteous preservation of my thoughts, needs, feelings, and wants. I lived, to satisfy this person who thought she was wounded, and had to save herself, guard herself, hide behind self-destructive habits, patterns, and behaviors, dogmatic beliefs, a closed heart, anger, and invulnerability.

The old me is dying, and each second she gasps for air, for one more labored breathe, I have to gently remind myself, it is okay to let her go.

It’s strange to me now, to realize I had some insight. That when that place would be completed, I’d be dead, and buried there. I drove by today on my way back from a walk, and saw – it is just about done. The construction crew and equipment no longer litter the parking lot. The protective film pulled from shiny windows. The stripes for marking where to park, freshly painted.

My stomach sank a little but then I laughed, out loud, hard, the rest of the way back home. I was right – I will be dead and buried there when it’s finally finished, just not in the way I always said.

So I’m going to go there, soon. Take flowers, a blanket, and pick a nice spot under a tall tree. I’m going to write my eulogy, and memorialize the woman I have been for half my life, and take something sentimental and bury it there. I even contemplated the significance of making that object my wedding ring, but I’m not certain of that yet, that might hurt as much as an actual death, but I also really love the strength it would take, and the finality of it.

The old me is dying. And I’m not certain what or who will take her place, but under the surface I know, I have to let her go.

I’ve written often lately about God’s plans. His call to my life going forward. It involves so much grace, so much love, but it’s also a very difficult journey awaiting me. There is uncertainty, and no guarantee, that what I hope for, believe in, will come to pass. With my husband, with his heart, with his salvation, and for us and our family. All I can do is have the perseverance and the discipline to continue on this road, where I’m aware that sometimes we have to let go – surrender – to a story much bigger than what we were writing. I am entirely invested and believe that what my part is, is to change so much, and set down so much heavy weight, shame, regret, and unforgiveness that I wore like a scar in my skin all these years.

I’m not saying this death means I’m letting go of the hope and faith I have for restoration, nor that I’ll ever stop praying and believing for that. It’s part of this new person, to have faith in the unseen, and stand for what seems impossible knowing God can do miracles; I trust Him, know Him, more every day, and He’s done it before, He will do it again.

But I’m softening. That’s the word that keeps returning to my heart and my lips. And that in itself is a miracle. When I spent so many years so angry, I wasn’t of gentle spirit. I was hard and cold, closed off to deeply knowing another, because I could not even really know myself.

Now I’m becoming, I see, someone so capable of being calm under the greatest pressure, and the hardest transition of my life. I never expected this or saw this coming, but it goes hand-in-hand with surrendering my life to something much greater, more beautiful, than me. True repentance, a significant feeling of being held in my sorrow by grace, by forgiveness, by unending sacrificial love. It’s what I’ve missed; as a woman we’re not meant to carry anger and coldness, those attributes contribute much greater to some man fighting a battle he’d never win, yet I embodied that for so long.

My heart craves now a tenderness, and I realize that this drive comes from such a gorgeous realization; it’s how Jesus loves me. I stand now, then, like a flower, thirsting for soft Spring rain at dawn, knowing it’ll come and I’ll drink until I blossom open under the afternoon sun. It’s like poetry, like tip-toeing in a long dress over a clean wooden floor, carefree and unburdened. It’s like a sweet kitten nestling into her mother’s tummy to take a nap after drinking her fill of sweet nurturing milk. It’s the way I feel when my baby girl looks up at me and says, your hugs are like heaven to me, Mama, they’re the best, or when my son laughs so hard his dark eyes actually sparkle. It’s the song of my brown-eyed-girl as she belts it out in her bedroom and I stand smiling, just to listen, at her door. It’s my beautiful firstborn when she tells me, still, I love you, mommy, though she’s only three years away from being an adult. It’s when I see my father once a year, and like short chapters in a long book I didn’t get to read the in-between pages, as his eyes get softer and the lines in his face deepen, but we still laugh at the same jokes as we did when I was young…

I’m noticing the softer side. The simple things. The ones we take with us to our deathbed, and wish we’d had more days like that, to just be – with what matters most.
For years, I couldn’t see it. I did not care. Because I was so wrapped up in bondage, of myself, and a victim to the whims and daggers of others offenses against me, I couldn’t see. I wouldn’t have known how to soften and receive grace living that way.

This death is painful. It is like choosing to crawl into the mouth of a beast knowing every sharp tooth will slice deep into my flesh and hurt like hell, and my only reward to be there is to die.

It is time.

For a long time, the past few years, I’ve asked God. No, that’s wrong. I’ve screamed at God, why. I’ve cried so hard I couldn’t breathe in prayerful sorrow, pleading, why this, again? Why this pain? Why this betrayal? Have I not had enough, God? How much is it for one lifetime, that I’m here, again? It wasn’t just this season, but spans the entirety of my life, literally from birth it has been trial after trial, defeat, abuse, abandonment, loss. Then things repeated: The irony is that one of the most significant moments of my entire life happened when I was 21, and I thought, this has to be the worst thing that will ever happen to me – I believed that. I laid in a bed, my head on a young man whom I loved with no reservations, my whole heart his, on his chest, and then a confession changed my story, forevermore. It led to losing love, love I cherished very deeply. It led to a death, not my own but my mother.
Several years later, the exact same story unfolded, in the same sequence, in the same manner, with the same confession. It was exactly the same, only the names were changed.
So I yelled and cursed God, and my heart hardened more this time than ever in my life. I’d had enough, and how dare a loving, caring God allow this? When will I know true peace? When will I get to live as others seem to do, without conflict, without anger, without a cold, weary heart?

A death had to come. It came the first time, and it’s coming now, but this time, it is me. It has to be me.

Because the only way to recover, to find peace, is to walk through this and face it. All the complexity, the depth, the sorrow, the regret, the resentment – at myself and others who’ve hurt me – I CANNOT run from it, the way I did the first time.

I learned it will follow me, wherever I go. So I must walk boldly and humbly into the earth, lay my tired old bones to rest, shovel the dirt over top, and say goodbye. It is the only way forward.

So that delicate takes place of rough edges. So that what was protected, guarded metal hidden away in a box in my heart becomes a precious, shiny ring around my finger, out, for the world to see. So that God is not just something I say I believe, but a beautiful testimony of grace shining through me.

I need this now. It is necessary, and it is here. I’d say, finally, but I can’t. Because all that led me here had to be. I had to live that way, feel that hurt, so I would see how imperative it is to do the harder thing, and let the old me go.

And so, the beautiful building sat empty. For years. Undone, ugly, and I always wondered, why doesn’t someone finish it? Clearly an investor or the landowner put a lot of money into even just the frame itself, let alone all the obvious plans he’d had for it, there to see but just ever-unfinished. So it became my beacon, of a sort, that if they’d ever actually come back and restore something that was once a dream, it would be so long from now I’d be dead and be a able to be buried there. You know? I’ve learned one thing throughout my life – my words hold much power, and I can almost predict things, not in like a woo-woo way, but just, by instinct, intuition I guess. Somehow I professed, many years ago, this one obscure thing about where and when I’d be buried.

Now it’s coming to pass. Just in an entirely different way. I think it’s a beautiful sentiment, actually, and I laugh even now, because it almost makes me only want to declare great things from now, onward. So actually, hey! That just renewed my hope on another thing I’ve been writing about lately – but alas, yes, only good predictions from now on!

I never thought this season would be a good time to die. But my breathes are shallow, the time is drawing near.
The dome of copper, the checkered tiled walls, the fresh paint – what’s completed there is being complete in me. Praise be to God, the knower of all things, who holds my days, numbered in His hands. I commit my old soul to His will for my life, and lay this body to rest.

What comes forth in the light, as it leaves the darkness behind, is a new creation. A woman at His feet, through whom all grace is given and from which all hope is born.