What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means ! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed , and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
Romans 6:1-10
The years can truly creep up on you, and you never realize the age that isbeginning to show on your grandparents. What used to be taken for granted now requires assistance . What used to be a private act now becomes a public production. That transition for Mamaw and Papaw came suddenly, and unexpectedly. It caught us all off guard, and we scrambled to give them the assistance that they needed.
It hadreally only been a couple of years since my grandmother’s mother had died at the tender young age of 99. She had lived a long and wonderful life as a mother, a schoolteacher, a grandmother, a great-grandmother, and a great-great-grandmother. When her years caught up with her, she moved in with her daughter – my grandmother. With tender compassion and joy, my grandmother cared for her aging mother with love and gentleness until the burden became too heavy to carry. She then continued to care for her at a nearby assisted care facility until my great-grandmother’s death.
When Mamaw’s motherdied Mamaw still seemed young to us. She was exhausted by the service she had rendered for the last several years, but she seemed to still have a lot of life left in her, and a lot of care yet to give. Papaw’s age seemed to be catching up with him, but even at that he still seemed to be full of energy. Papaw and Mamaw both loved life, and lived it to its fullest. At the center of that life was God, family, and church.
Granny and Granddaddy’s story is very much the same. For the last few years of Granny’s mother’s life, Granny and Granddaddy lived across the street from her, andwere able to care for most of her needs. But that care seemed to take a significant toll on the caregivers.
I’m a rarity in that growing up I knew and knew well three sets of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents. Each of these five sets of grandparents had a profound influence on me and my life, and yet they could not have been more different from each other.
Pawpaw Harrison, my mother’s grandfather, was an engineer, a jokester, and a Texan. With an engineering background myself, I am in awe as I consider the various developments from an engineering perspective that he waseither involved in or witness to. He once came home and announced to my grandmother, “Well, Bob, we burned a turkey today.” My grandmother was Barbara, but he always called her Bob. What he was referring to though was the fact that he had been able to mess around with an early version of a microwave, and burned a turkey in the process .
As a jokester he was constantly pulling one stunt or another, and even his explanations of his faux pas in his later years were in the form of hilarity. At one point I noted that he had a bruise on his head, and I asked him where it came from. “Well, you see, I was bending down to get some toilet water on and the seat fell.” In actuality he had just run into a shelf, but the story he shared was much more entertaining. Although he never served in the Navy he would have done well there. Sea stories are an important part of being in the Navy, and we don’t let the truth interfere with a good sea story.
There were, of course, occasions where no embellishment was required. One night as he lay dreamily sleeping through the night, he dreamed that robbers were trying to threaten him and my great-grandmother. As the valiant eighty-year-old gentleman that he was he rose to his full stature as knight in shining armor and successfully fended them off. Of course, my great-grandmother awoke in the morning with a rather splendid shiner to show for his valiant efforts.
Although the Texan moved out of Texas and made a home in South Carolina for the last 40 years of his life, the Texan in him never died. He was immensely proud of his Texas heritage, and many of his eccentricities were as big as Texas. Combining the jokester and the Texan he once asked for a cup of coffee at a local restaurant where we were having dinner. The waitress obliged him with a fresh, hot cup of coffee set right in front of him. No sooner had she set the cup down and begun to walk away did he stop her, “Darlin’. Excuse me, Darlin’. You need to take this cup back and bring me another; I simply cannot drink this cup of coffee.”
The young waitress looked at him absolutely crestfallen. She could not begin to imagine what could possibly be wrong with his cup of coffee; he hadn’t even tasted it yet. “What’s wrong with it sir?”
“Well, you see,” he began, “this here cup is a right handed cup, and well, I’m left handed. I’m gonna’ have to ask you to bring me a left handed cup.”
“Excuse me?” The poor waitress was beside herself in confusion. She had never known that cups came in right hand and left hand versions.
“That’s right, I need a left handed cup,” he firmly announced.
“Well, OK sir. I’ll see what I can do,” she replied as she picked up his right handed cup and returned to the kitchen.
My grandmother, his daughter, simply looked at him and said, “Daddy, what on earth are you doin’ to that poor girl? That’s just not right.”
I watched the whole scene not quite sure of what was going on and noted our waitress returning to our table. She was carrying what looked like to me the exact same cup of coffee. She quietly and efficiently sat his cup and saucer back on the table, exactly as it had been before, and then she paused. She stopped, looked him square in the eye and the placed her index finger on the handle of his cup of coffee and rotated it 180 degrees so that the handle was now facing to his left. Then, ever so quietly, stood back up. “Will this cup do sir?”
He gave her a big Cheshire cat smile and said, “That’ll do just perfectly darlin’. Thank you very much.” That night, our waitress went home with a Texas size tip of $50 from a jokester of an engineer from Texas.
His lovely bride, my Mawmaw Harrison, was a force to be reckoned with, and as delicate as a rose simultaneously. During WWII she went down to enlist in the Army along with one of her daughters, my aunt. By the time the day was over Mawmaw was in the Army and my aunt was not because she was not accepted; her health was not good enough for Army standards. The truly amazing thing about Mawmaw was at the point she entered the Army she was already a grandmother, north of 50 years old.
Mawmaw was initially sent to Charleston, SC as a place to put her and assigned to the enlisted club serving drinks. The irony was that she was a teetotaler, and didn’t drink a drop of alcohol. This did not sit very well with her at all, and before long she was reassigned to Alaska.
She and a number of other ladies were assigned there together, mostly doing some variation of administrative tasks. Mawmaw was quite literally old enough to be the mother of pretty much every lady there, so they all affectionately called her, “Mom.” In Alaska they soon discovered that she knew how to play the piano and the organ and was quickly reassigned to be a chaplain’s assistant for the balance of her time in the Army. This made her extremely happy, but when the Army offered for anyone over the age of 50 an early discharge she was the first to raise her hand; she had already experienced as much fun as she could stand. During the time she was in Alaska, however, she was able to reunite with her son, my uncle, who had already been serving on active duty in the Navy for a number of years and was already the rank of Chief Petty Officer during that visit. Most of the soldiers assumed that he was an officer and kept saluting him, not realizing that he was a non-commissioned officer and did not rate a salute. Eventually, he tired of correcting the soldiers and just started returning their salutes with an equally crisp Navy salute.
Mawmaw’s delicate side was as equally incredible and it relates to the skills she put to good use on behalf of the Army, she was a musician. Actually, she wasn’t just any musician, she was an incredible musician. In the years following the War she was a very active member of the American Guild of Organists, and eventually would serve as the National President of that austere organization; not the kind of title they just pass out for fun.
Mawmaw’s mixture of strength and beauty somewhat escaped me, however, at the tender age of 4. About the time I was born she crossed the threshold of her 70th year, and as most people are aware, few bodies are quite as lean in your 70’s as they may have been in your 20’s or 30’s. Also, an inescapable truth is that children are not always known for their decorum. So, when I noticed that Mawmaw was not quite as slender as my mother or even her mother, Granny, I was foolish enough to comment on that fact, “Mawmaw is fat.”
The gasps that ensued from my bluntness drew a rather significant vacuum on the room. Granny, very quickly, pulled me aside and pointed out that it is not polite to refer to someone as fat. This was a shocker to me. “But she is,” I replied.
“She most certainly is not,” Granny imparted, “she is pleasedly plump.” Well, how do you argue with that? I have no idea of why that conversation has stuck with me all these years, but boy has it.
Grandpa Lackey, my father’s maternal grandfather, could not have been more different from Pawpaw Harrison if you paid him. Both were tall; very tall in fact, and slender. Pawpaw had spent his life in academics and engineering, and Grandpa was a simple country farmer. Neither, however, thought he was better or worse than the other; they were just where they wanted to be doing what they wanted to do.
When people today tell me that they are building a new home for themselves I know that it is more euphemistic than reality. At most, people today may put on a coat of paint, but even that is often a stretch. When I say that Grandpa Lackey built his house that is exactly what I mean. The home he built, that my grandmother was born in, was rustic to the maximum degree. The foundation was large smooth stones that he gathered from the river and placed in just the right combination to level the old wooden floor as the home’s foundation. With his hammer, his saw, his nails, his blood, his sweat, and his tears he assembled that humble house into a home that they would enjoy for years. It wasn’t much to look at. It was not painted. The roof was tin but quite rusty. All the floorboards were in and in place, but you could clearly see the ground below through the small gaps between those floorboards. It was humble, but it got his family going.
As the years progressed he built another home not 50 feet from the first. This second home was more refined with a brick foundation and a large front porch from which he was able to survey the land rolling out in front of his house. Bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, and all were immaculately built and beautiful. This home too, he built with his own hands.
He did not stop with those, however. He dug a well and plumbed the water to his second home. He built a spectacular barn, and a storage building. He built a tobacco shed for drying the tobacco he raised. All the while, he raised the tobacco that provided his family’s income, and he grew a garden and raised cows that kept his family fed.
In later years, after he had retired from the farming that had kept his family fed and housed for so many years, he would continue to make his way around his farm. He would often walk down the hill, behind the original home built, to the well house that he also built just to get a sip of water. This, of course, caused my great-grandmother, Grandma Lackey, much anxiety because his steadiness on his feet was not quite what had once been. But, also, a fear she once shared with me was that she was afraid the crawdads in the stream that ran under the well house would come through the spigot and get him in the mouth.
I was amused with her fear, but reminded through it of her love for my grandfather. She had always been one who was concerned for the welfare of others, especially in her chosen career of teaching. Grandma Lackey had taught at the local elementary school her entire adult life, and even years after she had retired it was easy to see the love she still had for the great calling of being a teacher. Whenever another family member, who was also a teacher, would talk with her about teaching her face would absolutely light up with joy. It was a beautiful thing to behold.
As each of these incredible grandparents faded from my life my life changed. My innocence faded as I had to come to grips with the reality of death and I had to experience firsthand the reality of the pain of death. With each of them, however, I began to see death in a different way.
Death is as much a part of life as birth is; you really will not have one without the other. But, from a faith perspective as a Christian, I have come to know that death is no more than a boundary that we must pass through in order to experience life in a whole new way. The Apostle Paul proclaims this so well, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:3-4)
Until we die we cannot enjoy the resurrection that awaits us, and neither can those we love. Appropriately, we mourn the deaths of those whom we love, just as Jesus himself wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35). Yet, we rejoice in the new life that those we love who have already died enjoy, as we ourselves know awaits us as well.
To capture all the stories of my grandparents would take several lifetimes, but these are an offering in love of what they gave me in love. These stories come to an end, but a resurrection of tears and laughter will follow as we share these and other stories together.
The years can truly creep up on you, and you never realize the age that is
It had
When Mamaw’s mother
Granny and Granddaddy’s story is very much the same. For the last few years of Granny’s mother’s life, Granny and Granddaddy lived across the street from her, and
I’m a rarity in that growing up I knew and knew well three sets of grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents. Each of these five sets of grandparents had a profound influence on me and my life, and yet they could not have been more different from each other.
Pawpaw Harrison, my mother’s grandfather, was an engineer, a jokester, and a Texan. With an engineering background myself, I am in awe as I consider the various developments from an engineering perspective that he was
As a jokester he was constantly pulling one stunt or another, and even his explanations of his faux pas in his later years were in the form of hilarity. At one point I noted that he had a bruise on his head, and I asked him where it came from. “Well, you see, I was bending down to get some toilet water on and the seat fell.” In actuality he had just run into a shelf, but the story he shared was much more entertaining. Although he never served in the Navy he would have done well there. Sea stories are an important part of being in the Navy, and we don’t let the truth interfere with a good sea story.
There were, of course, occasions where no embellishment was required. One night as he lay dreamily sleeping through the night, he dreamed that robbers were trying to threaten him and my great-grandmother. As the valiant eighty-year-old gentleman that he was he rose to his full stature as knight in shining armor and successfully fended them off. Of course, my great-grandmother awoke in the morning with a rather splendid shiner to show for his valiant efforts.
Although the Texan moved out of Texas and made a home in South Carolina for the last 40 years of his life, the Texan in him never died. He was immensely proud of his Texas heritage, and many of his eccentricities were as big as Texas. Combining the jokester and the Texan he once asked for a cup of coffee at a local restaurant where we were having dinner. The waitress obliged him with a fresh, hot cup of coffee set right in front of him. No sooner had she set the cup down and begun to walk away did he stop her, “Darlin’. Excuse me, Darlin’. You need to take this cup back and bring me another; I simply cannot drink this cup of coffee.”
The young waitress looked at him absolutely crestfallen. She could not begin to imagine what could possibly be wrong with his cup of coffee; he hadn’t even tasted it yet. “What’s wrong with it sir?”
“Well, you see,” he began, “this here cup is a right handed cup, and well, I’m left handed. I’m gonna’ have to ask you to bring me a left handed cup.”
“Excuse me?” The poor waitress was beside herself in confusion. She had never known that cups came in right hand and left hand versions.
“That’s right, I need a left handed cup,” he firmly announced.
“Well, OK sir. I’ll see what I can do,” she replied as she picked up his right handed cup and returned to the kitchen.
My grandmother, his daughter, simply looked at him and said, “Daddy, what on earth are you doin’ to that poor girl? That’s just not right.”
I watched the whole scene not quite sure of what was going on and noted our waitress returning to our table. She was carrying what looked like to me the exact same cup of coffee. She quietly and efficiently sat his cup and saucer back on the table, exactly as it had been before, and then she paused. She stopped, looked him square in the eye and the placed her index finger on the handle of his cup of coffee and rotated it 180 degrees so that the handle was now facing to his left. Then, ever so quietly, stood back up. “Will this cup do sir?”
He gave her a big Cheshire cat smile and said, “That’ll do just perfectly darlin’. Thank you very much.” That night, our waitress went home with a Texas size tip of $50 from a jokester of an engineer from Texas.
His lovely bride, my Mawmaw Harrison, was a force to be reckoned with, and as delicate as a rose simultaneously. During WWII she went down to enlist in the Army along with one of her daughters, my aunt. By the time the day was over Mawmaw was in the Army and my aunt was not because she was not accepted; her health was not good enough for Army standards. The truly amazing thing about Mawmaw was at the point she entered the Army she was already a grandmother, north of 50 years old.
Mawmaw was initially sent to Charleston, SC as a place to put her and assigned to the enlisted club serving drinks. The irony was that she was a teetotaler, and didn’t drink a drop of alcohol. This did not sit very well with her at all, and before long she was reassigned to Alaska.
She and a number of other ladies were assigned there together, mostly doing some variation of administrative tasks. Mawmaw was quite literally old enough to be the mother of pretty much every lady there, so they all affectionately called her, “Mom.” In Alaska they soon discovered that she knew how to play the piano and the organ and was quickly reassigned to be a chaplain’s assistant for the balance of her time in the Army. This made her extremely happy, but when the Army offered for anyone over the age of 50 an early discharge she was the first to raise her hand; she had already experienced as much fun as she could stand. During the time she was in Alaska, however, she was able to reunite with her son, my uncle, who had already been serving on active duty in the Navy for a number of years and was already the rank of Chief Petty Officer during that visit. Most of the soldiers assumed that he was an officer and kept saluting him, not realizing that he was a non-commissioned officer and did not rate a salute. Eventually, he tired of correcting the soldiers and just started returning their salutes with an equally crisp Navy salute.
Mawmaw’s delicate side was as equally incredible and it relates to the skills she put to good use on behalf of the Army, she was a musician. Actually, she wasn’t just any musician, she was an incredible musician. In the years following the War she was a very active member of the American Guild of Organists, and eventually would serve as the National President of that austere organization; not the kind of title they just pass out for fun.
Mawmaw’s mixture of strength and beauty somewhat escaped me, however, at the tender age of 4. About the time I was born she crossed the threshold of her 70th year, and as most people are aware, few bodies are quite as lean in your 70’s as they may have been in your 20’s or 30’s. Also, an inescapable truth is that children are not always known for their decorum. So, when I noticed that Mawmaw was not quite as slender as my mother or even her mother, Granny, I was foolish enough to comment on that fact, “Mawmaw is fat.”
The gasps that ensued from my bluntness drew a rather significant vacuum on the room. Granny, very quickly, pulled me aside and pointed out that it is not polite to refer to someone as fat. This was a shocker to me. “But she is,” I replied.
“She most certainly is not,” Granny imparted, “she is pleasedly plump.” Well, how do you argue with that? I have no idea of why that conversation has stuck with me all these years, but boy has it.
Grandpa Lackey, my father’s maternal grandfather, could not have been more different from Pawpaw Harrison if you paid him. Both were tall; very tall in fact, and slender. Pawpaw had spent his life in academics and engineering, and Grandpa was a simple country farmer. Neither, however, thought he was better or worse than the other; they were just where they wanted to be doing what they wanted to do.
When people today tell me that they are building a new home for themselves I know that it is more euphemistic than reality. At most, people today may put on a coat of paint, but even that is often a stretch. When I say that Grandpa Lackey built his house that is exactly what I mean. The home he built, that my grandmother was born in, was rustic to the maximum degree. The foundation was large smooth stones that he gathered from the river and placed in just the right combination to level the old wooden floor as the home’s foundation. With his hammer, his saw, his nails, his blood, his sweat, and his tears he assembled that humble house into a home that they would enjoy for years. It wasn’t much to look at. It was not painted. The roof was tin but quite rusty. All the floorboards were in and in place, but you could clearly see the ground below through the small gaps between those floorboards. It was humble, but it got his family going.
As the years progressed he built another home not 50 feet from the first. This second home was more refined with a brick foundation and a large front porch from which he was able to survey the land rolling out in front of his house. Bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, and all were immaculately built and beautiful. This home too, he built with his own hands.
He did not stop with those, however. He dug a well and plumbed the water to his second home. He built a spectacular barn, and a storage building. He built a tobacco shed for drying the tobacco he raised. All the while, he raised the tobacco that provided his family’s income, and he grew a garden and raised cows that kept his family fed.
In later years, after he had retired from the farming that had kept his family fed and housed for so many years, he would continue to make his way around his farm. He would often walk down the hill, behind the original home built, to the well house that he also built just to get a sip of water. This, of course, caused my great-grandmother, Grandma Lackey, much anxiety because his steadiness on his feet was not quite what had once been. But, also, a fear she once shared with me was that she was afraid the crawdads in the stream that ran under the well house would come through the spigot and get him in the mouth.
I was amused with her fear, but reminded through it of her love for my grandfather. She had always been one who was concerned for the welfare of others, especially in her chosen career of teaching. Grandma Lackey had taught at the local elementary school her entire adult life, and even years after she had retired it was easy to see the love she still had for the great calling of being a teacher. Whenever another family member, who was also a teacher, would talk with her about teaching her face would absolutely light up with joy. It was a beautiful thing to behold.
As each of these incredible grandparents faded from my life my life changed. My innocence faded as I had to come to grips with the reality of death and I had to experience firsthand the reality of the pain of death. With each of them, however, I began to see death in a different way.
Death is as much a part of life as birth is; you really will not have one without the other. But, from a faith perspective as a Christian, I have come to know that death is no more than a boundary that we must pass through in order to experience life in a whole new way. The Apostle Paul proclaims this so well, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:3-4)
Until we die we cannot enjoy the resurrection that awaits us, and neither can those we love. Appropriately, we mourn the deaths of those whom we love, just as Jesus himself wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35). Yet, we rejoice in the new life that those we love who have already died enjoy, as we ourselves know awaits us as well.
To capture all the stories of my grandparents would take several lifetimes, but these are an offering in love of what they gave me in love. These stories come to an end, but a resurrection of tears and laughter will follow as we share these and other stories together.
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