The Eyes of Grace

I knew I shouldn’t have left him alone. He didn’t answer my calls. I told him to keep the phone close by and felt something was wrong when he didn’t answer. My heart started beating so fast and my hand was shaking as I fumbled with my house keys. I opened the front door and panicked when I saw him in his recliner, foaming at the mouth.”

“He was the love of my life and I had waited for him for 25 years. “I couldn’t understand why God would take him away from me now. My heart was racing and my head was spinning with the thought of losing him. With tears running down my face I started praying all the way to the hospital begging God not to take him from me.”

“The river was so tempting. I was fearless. At five or six I took a rowboat out into the channel blissfully rowing along by myself when I saw my mother yelling at me from the stone wall. There could have been a huge gray hulk of a ship bearing down on me for all I knew, but I arrived at port safely where my mother promptly took the oars away from me never to be seen again. (The oars that is not my mother). Little did I know! Those were the fearless years.”

When Chuck returned from Vietnam, he was assigned to Fort Bragg, NC. It was while there that our third child, Stacy was diagnosed with Acute Lymphatic Leukemia. Ever since her birth Stacy had unexplained fevers. The doctors never found a cause and eventually the fever passed.

One day while we all were swimming at the post pool, Stacy said her chest hurt and pointed to her sternum. She didn’t want to swim anymore. She was only six years old at the time and had been complaining of chest pains. When the doctor gave us the diagnosis, I felt like I was falling –falling down a deep well, screaming at the top of my lungs. I thought my heart would stop. The hardest thing I ever had to do was to go into her room and pretend everything was fine.