Recently my husband and I traveled to East Jordan, Michigan, for the celebration of life of my mother’s sister, Aunt Pat. Patricia Vance Schloop was several months past 100 years old when she passed on, vibrant and beloved to the end.

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Dear Aunt Pat:

Thanks for thousands of hot dogs and s’mores, served on summer evenings to children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, extended family and all the others who became family, after a reunion or a day of swimming and boating in Lake Charlevoix.

Thanks for guiding us down those old two-tracks, through farm fields and woods, to the old family cemeteries. Thanks for telling us the human stories that made our ancestors and their struggles come alive.

Thanks for the stories you told me about growing up on the farm, barefoot but looking everyone else straight in the eye, believing what your mother taught you, that “you’re as good anybody else in this world”.

Thanks for raising five terrific children and encouraging them and their children as they went out into the world and did good stuff.

Thanks for being my first role model of a working mother, for all those years you worked as a nurse while also raising your kids and being a minister’s wife, loving and supporting so many congregations, so many people.

Thanks for your deep faith, not talked but lived.  Thanks for the rock-bottom trust you had in God, a pragmatic trust that your folks modeled through good times and bad, on that rural farm in Northern Michigan, and that you grew up believing, that you lived in your own life and passed on to us.

Thanks for your deep love of East Jordan, for continuing to go there every summer, even after some of us told you you were too old to do it.  Thanks for being an anchor in Northern Michigan for all of us who visited you there.

Thanks for showing us that even though we all eventually get old (sometimes really old!), we can retain to the end the basic things about us, such as our love for our family, our passion for games, our humor and “sass”, our intellect, our political convictions, our continuing desire to help others and (underpinning every other part of our lives) a deep faith in God and reliance upon Jesus and his promises in the Bible.

The last time I saw you, Aunt Pat, you said that you didn’t know why the good Lord hadn’t taken you home yet, but that several people had told you that they found you inspirational, and you wondered if that was why God was leaving you around a little while longer.

My mother (your sister Jane) once told me that in life we keep taking on new roles in the family, through the years.  That we should not try to hold on to our old role when it’s time to move on, that letting go of our old role gives someone else an opportunity to grow, and that we can be proud of our own growth, once we learn how to fill our new role.

Aunt Pat, you left a large legacy in your role as the last of your generation, representing the best of their values and passing them on to all of us.

And now, Aunt Pat, Rest in Peace.

We will muddle on through, those of us who are now the de facto eldest generation. We’ll find our way, with God’s help. For as you reminded us, in those carefully chosen hymns that we sang at your funeral and that became your last message to us, God will always be there for every single one of us. Always.

“The Soul that on Jesus has leaned for Repose,
“I will not, I will not desert to his Foes;
“That Soul, tho’ all Hell should endeavor to shake,
“I’ll never–no never–no never forsake. “*

*From “It is well with my soul,” by Horatio Spafford.