Gerig’s Musings

Don is enjoying a new life in heaven with God and the saints that have gone on before him.  I keep trying to imagine what it must be like meeting his parents, sister-in-law, cousins, aunt, grandparents, my parents and other family members.  I’m so glad that we will know and be known in heaven!

I, too, have a new life to live without Don at my side to consult about a myriad of things.  We talked about everything.  He always consulted me about how to use our money, we asked each other what to have for dinner, if this was a good day to go to Sam’s Club with my sister and brother-in-law, who we were going to call to go out with once or twice a week, etc.   We often got our calendars out to make sure we each knew what the other had planned so that we wouldn’t double book ourselves.  I told Denise, our daughter, that he had an inner sense of what the root of a problem was and could figure out how to solve it.  He was always better at reading people than I was–women’s intuition aside.  He was intelligent, interesting and funny all at once.  I’ve found some books recently that it looked like he was intending to read, but was having trouble focusing his mind and his eyes to do it in the last few months.  So, I’m having the joy of giving them to some of our good friends as a little remembrance of their friendship with Don. 

Don prepared me for his homegoing.  He had all his papers updated and ready–had even made a list of things I needed to do when he died.  Yesterday I went through the list and made all the calls I needed to make to start things moving in the right direction and I was so thankful for him and his organization.  It made me feel so loved and cared for by this man with whom I had spent 48+ years.

I, personally, loved his Memorial Service because I knew it was exactly what he wanted.  He had written it all out a few weeks before Christmas, not knowing that before the New Year he would go into the hospital and never come back to our home again.  Our organist, Bob Hobby, captured his love of music.  (He liked it so he could hear it!)  The Gospel passage that Pastor Fugate chose for his homily was very meaningful to me.  He spoke of the time Jesus and the disciples were in a boat when a storm came up.  He emphasized that Jesus was in the boat with them as the storm was raging.  Interestingly, the next day my personal reading took me to Hebrews 6:17-19:  “Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath.  God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope offered to us may be greatly encouraged.  We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure…”   Both boat analogies have strengthened the fact that God will be with me and keep me anchored to Him.  My prayer is that I won’t be bogged down in the shallowness of bitterness, anger or self-pity and also keep from drifting away from the safety found in Him.

Thanks, once again, to all of you who have followed this blog for almost a year and have written us notes of encouragement.  Bless you!  Caroline