The telling...

I woke this morning scratchy throat sore, face aching.  Sick.  I push on, I don't like slowing down.  No resting, regular day.

After lunch our phone rings...  A woman's voice, asking about life insurance.  Ahhh, the work of a farmers wife.  And I talk to her about this and that, for the farm.  For it's interests.  She is a financial adviser after all, it is her business the details of the farm somehow, her voice seems cold.

After her talk of this and that I ask her... we have money scraped together.  Saved carefully for college educations.  Dreams for the far future where I am still afraid to dream.  For my daughters, their beginning.  What to do with this money?  How do we save for Sarah, add to Josie's or open a new account?  Because we do this when they are one... and when Marie turned one things were different and we did not save for her far future, we were just loving her and taking care of her for that day.  And she asks me, how many children do you have now?

The world slows its spinning and I reach a hand for the dining room table because I need to hold on.  Three, I say, but only two here.

What about beneficiaries, of our accounts.  This is after all about farm business, not about babies.  You are saving she says, for Josie and Sarah.  What about Marie.  I have Josie and Marie listed as beneficiaries.

What about Marie indeed?  Marie who dances with the angels and sings praises in the gleaming city that is Heaven.

Marie has passed on I say, choking and gulping out the words.  Leaning my forehead against the cool glass of the window.  Wishing this wasn't happening.  The telling.  The telling that my baby, Little Mama is gone.

Well, the cold voiced woman says,  she'll need to be removed as your beneficiary seeing as she has passed away.  She does not say she is sorry.

Not away, just to Heaven!  I scream silent in my head.

How do I spell Sarah, what is her birthday?  On and on goes the cold voiced woman who's world seems to me a place of facts, figures, values.  Not my world.  Not the world of the lives we are discussing.  That world is faith, soil, sun warmed earth, wheat golden, children smiling, Marie dancing... somehow my vision of here is blurred with my hopes of Heaven.

She says a few more times this and that, what we must do.  Because of course, Marie has passed away. (She keeps saying it.  Lord please, make her stop saying it.)  Marie must be removed because she is not now.  And I stumble and mumble my way through.  And I hang up the phone and my tears fall hot, collapsed at my desk, holding my smallest baby on my lap.

Because the telling, the TELLING.  It has exhausted me.  Because I have just had to tell that my girl died.  The biggest wish of don't happen came true and I am here and Marie is not now.  And tears fall hot, choking my sore throat and I am back to the days and weeks of after Marie when I had to do the telling to the insurance, the hospitals, the plan makers.  And the hurt, the hurt of it all.

Shaking hands call Luke and I cry to him, hot tears, spilling pain.  And he whispers hushed comforts and I hold the littlest on my lap.

And I cry hot tears and rain falls wet in January...

Even though Marie is not now Jesus still is.  He was before her birth, He was with us when we were with her, He was after, He is now.  Jesus stays the same.  And white knuckled I cling to him, crying silent.  Jesus is the same...  and He will be the same tomorrow.  And for me that is enough.