Anne's Parting Shot

    Deciding to drive to Barnes & Noble for a coffee break, I did not know my sister would be dead within the hour.  What I knew then was this:  she was in process of dying, but no one could say how long she might linger.  After two months of hospital vigil, I knew that I needed still to take breaks to store up strength.  So when I felt a surge of joy and suddenly knew Anne would wholeheartedly endorse me using her debit card for a very early Christmas gift  (a couple books) for myself from her, I was pleasantly energized and anticipated telling her about it when I returned to her hospital room.  But she died during my coffee break.  I never got to the books.
    It didn’t take me long at all to understand that moment of joy from an enlarged perspective.  I remembered the sense of her pausing with me as I drove, free and happy, her long-hair, slender twenty-something energetic self again.  As I thought further about the time of that surprising joy, I realized it was no more than thirty minutes before her death.

    Now when I think of that moment, I feel like she was passing by on her way to heaven, checking in with me and letting me know she was ready for her new adventure with Jesus.  I cannot imagine that I really didn’t know I wouldn’t see her alive again this side of heaven.  That moment in the truck has turned out to be a huge comfort to me.

    At the time we receive heavenly blessings, we don’t always recognize them for what they are because we don’t know the future.  The passage of time brings experience and knowledge and new perspective.  I’ve worried at times about the danger of inflating Anne’s parting shot with a superimposed meaning.  But all of our memories have superimposed meanings because we know now what we didn’t know then.  And sometimes it is in the remembering that we come to really understand.