We recently passed the one year anniversary of Grandma June leaving us. She once told me a story that made me believe in Angels.

After her husband died, she was sick with grief and had trouble getting out of bed.

A light appeared at the foot of her bed and an Angel appeared and told her that she was going to be okay and she needed to get up and live her life.

I'm eternally grateful for that Angel because that experience gave her the will to become the person that helped raise me and become who I am today. It gave me the greatest storyteller I ever knew and someone whose touch could instantly make me feel safe and calm.

I think Grandma Junes' favorite book of the Bible were Psalms and Isaiah. She underlined several passages including Psalm 23 of course (i.e. Yea  though I walk through the shadow of death, I will feel no evil for thou art with me). A big common theme in the passages that she underlined was complete faith and belief in God and the peaceful safe haven that comes as a result.

That makes me think of the apartment she lived in for nearly 40 years, where we all visited her over the years.

Armed with her faith in God and everything in its place in her safe haven, she lived a full life that from the outside looking in may have seemed small. It may have seemed like a spiral getting smaller because she went from riding the bus, going to stores, celebrating holidays and special events with all of us to losing her hearing and going out less and less until she hardly left her apartment at all.

Usually that kind of story is very sad, but not for Grandma June. That spiral that got smaller was going up, not down. She had her angel, the words of the Bible, and her family to help raise her up and get her to where she always wanted to be: with her husband, with God, and with everyone else she missed who are no longer with us. And all that after living a life exactly the way she stubbornly wanted to live it. 

It hurts that you're not around but we will reunite again one day.