My husband and I walked into her hospital room and saw her frail, 83 year-old body resting, her white crowned head turned away from the door. I stood quietly for a moment, yellow gowned and blue gloved, watching Aunt Lois sleep. The rise and fall of her blanket gave reassurance that she was still with us. So many emotions were flooding over me, fond memories warming my heart. She started to stir; I softly called her name. She opened her eyes and said with a gentle, shaky voice the sweet term of endearment of my aunts and uncles, “Oh, Dawnie,” and suddenly I was a little girl again, coming to spend the night, or cook with her, or play with her Avon samples.

She reached out her thin hand. I could feel the coolness of her fingers through my hospital gloves. My husband, Terry, asked how she was doing, and she responded “My stomach is a little upset, but I can’t complain.”

She can’t complain.

Six months ago, Aunt Lois suffered a major heart attack. Since then, she has fought C. diff, a contagious bacteria that causes possibly life threatening colitis (hence the gowns and gloves). This is her third round in almost six months. The C. diff led to her being transferred from her mostly independent living facility in Plainfield to a nursing home in Brownsburg, causing her to be separated from her husband of 66 years. My Uncle Jerry is on oxygen and cannot travel very far from home. After being separated for a few months, he transferred to a room in the more independent building of her nursing home, riding his scooter over to her building for visits. Due to Uncle Jerry being more independent, he was not allowed to room with her in the nursing home building. A week or so later, Aunt Lois fell during the night and broke her hip, which led to her current stay in the hospital. The day before our visit, she had hip replacement surgery, which led to her kidneys shutting down.

She can’t complain.

How can she not? How can she still find hope? Where does her peace and comfort come from when she gets anxious feelings about her damaged heart, having a hard to manage bacterial infection, going through major surgery, and her organs shutting down? How does she love on me in that hospital room when she is in the midst of making the decision to go through dialysis or go under sedation and quietly leave us all?

She can’t complain…because of Jesus.

Her unwavering faith in her Savior gives her the peace and comfort to live with her infirmities and confidently make the life and death decisions. Her knowledge of the promises in His Word bring her strength to one day slip from this life and into His waiting arms, when He calls her home. His commandment to love one another gives her the ability to love others, even when it would be understandable to focus on herself.

“I never thought I would live to be this old,” she said with gratitude. “I have so many things to be thankful for.”

We talked about her 66 years of marriage. “So many people ask how we stayed together for so long. I tell them it is about being flexible and loving each other to work through the hard times.”

As we continued our visit, I read scripture to her from the hospital Gideon Bible. Her standard request: the 23rd Psalm.

My husband, Terry, gave the communication meditation last Sunday. He did not tell me his topic beforehand, which made it that more impactful when I heard it.

He shared a time in his life when he was moving from northern to central Indiana. His 3-year-old and 2-month-old daughters stayed with his parents in Wisconsin, while he and his first wife moved all of their belongings. The morning after the move into the new house, there was a knock on the door. It was the police telling him to call his parents. They did not have the phone turned on yet, and this was before cell phones. The police could not tell him why, but he needed to call home.

His face pinched with pain, my husband, who is usually a rock when it comes to his emotions, continued on. His eldest brother answered the phone, which told my husband that something was terribly wrong. His first thought was that something had happened to his dad.

“What’s going on?” were the first words out of Terry’s mouth. He tried to keep it light, to soften the bad news he felt was coming.

His brother blurted out, “Melanie is dead.”

No one can prepare you for the pain of losing your 2-month-old child and feeling helpless hundreds of miles away. No one can explain away the feeling of loss for a child you will never see grow up. For years he has wondered why this had to happen, while also understanding that God has the big picture and a plan, even if he cannot understand it with his limited human intelligence.

On Sunday, after he had told his story, Terry said. “This is how God feels…”

I thought he was going to say God felt this way watching Jesus, His son, die on the cross for our sins; it was a communion meditation, after all. Except, Terry used the present tense of ‘feel.’

“…when He loses one of us,” he finished.

God grieves when His children choose to leave their faith in Him and put their faith in a fallen world. He grieves when his children hear the message, but turn away from its Truth. God loved us so much that he sent His son to die for us. With a love that complete comes the pain of losing the ones you love, and there is not one of His creation that He does not love.