Porter Post

Beauty in our remembrance of Mom: It took losing Mom for me to realize what it meant just to have her, just to have a mom . Take note everyone, that's a hard lesson to learn. The beauty lies in that I love her harder and deeper. We are going to have a happy and tender reunion. Death, for me, seems less scary knowing that Mom will be there waiting for me. Mom will be memorialized for the grandkids in a different way now. Of course we wish they could grow up with her in person, but the way we talk about her and the stories we tell will paint a vivid and even angelic picture of her in their minds. We won't pretend that she was flawless, because nobody is, but their vision of her will be softer and brighter around the edges because of the extra dose of love that has grown out of our deepened appreciation for her. I think she would call that beauty for ashes too. Watching each of my siblings get up before me to speak at Mom's funeral and seeing the dimples that she passed ...

A thought that kept coming to my mind in the ensuing days of my mom's death was, "beauty for ashes." It turns out it comes from Isaiah 61:3 , "To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness." Those words, that reminder that the Lord will trade beauty for ashes, were my eye in the storm. I noticed so many ashes around me at first, but I also quickly started taking note of the beauty. Don't get me wrong, at the end of the day I would rather bag up all of the beautiful things I've seen in the last three weeks and send them back to their source if it meant that Mom was gearing up for her next trip down to my house and that I was caught up in planning our annual Harry Potter birthday party without another care in the world. But what I will isn't what matters and so I'm embracing the beauty in His will. I listened to a talk from Evan A. Schm...

My Mom died in the early hours of June 29 of complications from pneumonia. She was one month shy of her 67 th birthday. I’ll be processing everything from the morning of her death to the day she was buried for a long time. I’m so grateful that I was able to talk to my mom just two days before she passed. I had sat down at my computer after rocking Spencer to sleep and it was quiet time in the Porter house. My mind went blank as soon as I sat down and I relaxed, which is abnormal because I usually feel torn between doing ten things at once when I sit down to “get stuff done” during quiet time. So I thought, “Well, what should I do? It’s been a while since I talked to Mom...” When I asked her how she was she answered, “Well, actually not so good,” and she explained that she had just come home from the doctor’s office where she found out that she had pneumonia.   She filled me in on some details from her appointment and how she had been feeling recently. My mom has had and ...