One of my earliest memories is my grandmother’s burial. I was about three, and it was a summer day. The grass was green, the sky blue, and the flowers decorating my grandmother’s grave and the other graves in the cemetery were beautiful. I remember running along, enchanted by the beauty all around me.

I remember the night before, standing in front of my grieving mother in the funeral home. To my childish eyes, it was a grey, empty room – but full of flowers. I remember asking my mother, “if Grandma is in Heaven with Jesus, why are you crying?” I truly did not understand. Loss had not touched me, and all I saw was the beauty.

I remember the hurried trip from California to Iowa, driving through the night and napping in the backseat of my uncle’s car. I was a seasoned traveler, and was thrilled that he thought to stop overnight at a motel with a bowling alley and play with me. What love, what consideration, to give the child time to play at such a time…

I can only assume they brought me with them because they hoped that my grandmother would be able to see her only (at that time) grandchild before she died. She was in the hospital, and the hospital didn’t allow children under 10 to visit terminal patients… so I didn’t see her. (I do not remember my grandmother, although my mother tells me that we would have gotten along splendidly, as we have much in common. Grandma did get to see me a couple of times when I was even younger).

This makes me weird about death. My earliest memory is of beauty, and just as I believed as a child, if your loved one is with Jesus … well. Of course now I understand loss, and I understand about missing people. I miss my departed mother in law, my other grandparents, and friends. I wept at their funerals, and I wept a great deal more while they were sick unto death. I am not morbid – no gothic romanticism of decay or darkness. I simply see Heaven, and an end to pain. I am not in the least a comfortable person to be around in such extremity, and I am sad at that truth. But one cannot budge a conviction that is rooted in bedrock.

It’s like that with my faith. Oh, certainly my adult faith has been through the refiner’s fire, has walked from rebellion to obedience, it has been tried and is mature. But the bedrock of faith? I’ve never *not* known Jesus was there. I knew when I was a toddler, attempting to counsel my mother in her grief. I knew when I got saved a year or so later, when I realized that I hadn’t yet asked Jesus into my heart, and immediately put it on my to-do-as-soon-as-I-have-a-quiet-moment list. I knew. I’ve never *not* known. I don’t understand not knowing. This makes me perfectly dreadful at apologetics. I can memorize arguments, memorize facts – but it’s all just data. I believe because how could I not?

Pain frightens me. I’ve had plenty. Long illness, disability, dementia… those are terrifying. But death? Death is a doorway, however unpleasant, and on the other side is God. On the other side is the Forever Home, and someday I will walk through that door. And that day I will hug the grandmother who I ate Sunday supper with every week, and I will hug the grandmother whose face I wear. I will sit with my grandfathers and learn their stories, and I will run and play with my friend who will finally be healed in body and spirit, after a life of misery and abuse. I will finally get to tell my mother in law how much she meant to me, and how much I loved and respected her.

Death is a doorway, what matters is what is on the other side.