My grandmother was dying, and I wasn't quite sure I was up to the task of enduring it. The hospice nurse came in and spoke to her, the one struggling for the breaths, "Good job, JoAnne, you're working at it." Then the aside to us, the daughter, and the three daughters of the daughter, "We labor to enter this world, and we must labor to leave it as well." And suddenly I saw it all differently. I sat with the baby in my lap (does one bring an infant to a deathbed?! - but bringing one twin meant the kids at home could manage the other, and so it was that one not half a year into life was there in the presence of death). The baby helped me see it. As I had labored to bring her and her partner-in-utero from the darkness of the womb in to the sunshine of that September day, so Grandma was laboring to leave this dark world and enter in to the light of her Savior's presence. And then I knew what we could do. We could take the lead of the hospice ...
"These days, the closer she looks at her life, the more beauty she sees. There is something worth noticing everywhere."