My Very Favorite Thing of All

I have started half a dozen posts in the past month trying to put into writing what was occurring. I would sit down to type and none of it made sense. It was me just babbling on about incoherent thoughts and crisis. Some of them were sad, some happy, some angry. They definitely covered all the stages of grief, which what was happening. I was grieving. I lost my best friend almost two weeks ago. She was 94 years old, sharp as a tack and had enough sass to live on for another 50 years. Margaret Mary Theresea O'day Dahlke. One heck of a name for one heck of a lady. Margaret was my grandmother. Oh but she was so so much for than that. She was my friend. My mentor. My comic relief. My confidant. My biggest fan. My pen pal... We wrote letters. Hundreds of letters to each other the past 6+ years. As soon as I moved away, I was added to her list and she wrote me almost every week. Letters came in the form of newspaper clippings, cards, stickers(so many rooster stickers...vixen), Irish knick-knacks, and even once I received a letter on a roll of toilet paper. I told you, sass for days. It still doesn't seem quite real. I find myself not truly believing I will never again receive one of her letters. I had been mentally bracing myself for this time for the past couple years, knowing it would come eventually. The last letter came a week before her fall. We would sometimes write on cute, fun paper with flowers or bugs on it and always send extra for the other to use at a later time. This time it was lighthouses. It was a short letter, nothing of sustenance. It was still from her, which was all that mattered. I remember the night she died, I went downstairs for bed, opened the letter and took the extra pages out. I sat there and I wrote one final letter. I figured originally it would be full of woes and the pain of losing her and how life would be so dull without her in it. All very true, but that isn't what I wrote. I thanked her. I thanked her for always seeing my ugly corners and loving me more for them. I thanked her for keeping my secrets in all those letters. I thanked her for teaching me about myself in ways only she truly understood since they were inheritances I received from her. I praised God for the time He gave her to me. The words I wrote were joyous ones. And the reality is, I was joyous. Oh, what a beautiful end for her. On this earth, the end was horrifying. She did not die well. What a humble reminder that even to the most faithful of servants, we still remain on a broken and sinful earth. Yet, when I sat there thinking of her and the beautiful place where she is spending her eternity, I smiled. I cried tears of joy and happiness thinking of her seeing her ever loved husband again.... her daughter.... my brother... That my friends, I am jealous of her for. Some of you don't believe in a heaven or a hell or even any sort of afterlife. Here is my peace in that. I am okay looking like a fool at the end of the world if I am wrong about God. I would much rather be a fool and wrong than to live in this world having something as horrifying as my Grandma's fall and death happen and to not feel the endless joy for her afterlife. If we go through this broken, broken world and can somehow find joy and peace in it through the name of God, Im there. Every. Single. Time. So I praised her death and I praise the one whose death saved the world.
Margaret Mary Theresea O'day Dahlke is one of my favorite things. She is my very favorite of all.

                                             June 30th, 1920-October 21st 2014