When my father was dying and Mom and I were standing at his bedside in the hospital, Mom asked me to read Psalm 35 aloud to Dad. When I got to verse five, “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning,” Mom repeated it, raising her voice because Dad was hard of hearing. “Joy comes with the morning, Wirth. Joy comes with the morning,” she said. I know she was telling him not to be afraid, that he was headed for a new dawn in heaven, filled with joy.
My mother lived her life according to that verse.
My mother was one of those people who always looked for the dawn, even in the worst of situations.
She was a person of deep faith, of resilience, and an uncommon amount of common sense.
When she became a widow, Mom focused on the positive, reinventing her life by getting busy with new activities. She met other women for lunch. She went to concerts at Interlochen Fine Arts Academy. She went to two or three church services every Sunday.
Years later, when she moved to Chelsea Retirement Community, she reinvented herself again by coming up with a new purpose for her life: to be “an encourager of others”. And she was. She had a smile for every person there. She knew all their names and their stories. In addition, my mother wrote so many letters of encouragement to so many people that the postman said that half the mail that came every day was hers.
Mom fell and fractured her back when she was in her nineties, and to remove the pain the surgeon fused several bones in her spine. After that she walked bent over. “I could complain about this, about how I always have to look up to see people,” she said to me once. “But what good would that do?”
I am not blessed with the natural resilience my mother had. Self-pity knows where I live and visits me often. When I have a health challenge, it somehow seems necessary to explain every detail about the pain I am in.
But I keep working at it, becoming more like Mom.
I make gratitude lists. I say, “Good morning God, thanks for another day of life” before I get out of bed in the morning. I try to thank God for my trials, because I know He has hidden blessings inside all of them.
I do this because, as I kept telling my mother in the later years of her life, I want to be like her when I grow up.
Like my mother, I want to always remember that “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”