Uncle Grant

It has rained, gushed, our city was ravished.

It’s familiar to a few years back when our hamlet of Bragg Creek was washed away.

The magnitude, scale of this storm’s devastation far grander.

It had been beautiful the whole of that Memorial Monday.

We hung out banners and made lemonade, celebrated Lachlan’s fifth birthday.

Late into the afternoon the clouds deepened, thickened with threat.

As the storm gathered we got a call, one we had been dreading,

that death came to our beloved Uncle Grant.

Cancer

We knew it was coming, the last of his breath that took ours away, winded us with grief.

Roger’s Uncle, a pillar in our foundation, so much more like a father.

Just like that he was gone.

We gently slowed the celebrations down, fed the children dinner, placed them to bed, turned out the lights,

finding each other in the needed solitude of the night.

We had hardly settled when alerts started coming through our phones.

Tornados and floods, damaging winds, shattering thunder and lightning.

We found live data covering the storm, we could see the images of a moving storm, the darkest red covering the map sliding over our road, just then all of nature became very still, not even a leaf trembled.

When we looked up there was clear sky, about a half mile radius of complete dense energy hemmed by a ring of raging storm clouds.

We have never experienced anything so eerie. We were in the eye of the storm, the centre environment perfect for a tornado.

We gathered the children into our room and away from the windows and waiting until the utter stillness moved beyond.

How relieved we felt when once again the thunder, rain and wind clapped and shook around us. Holding to its force all of that night and into the next, shaking our home until pictures were rattled off interior walls.

Though the storm was wild and gruesome it somehow fitted the state of our grief.

In those early unfamiliar moments of loss, sunshine and warmth may have felt insulting.

For those hours of unrelenting nerves, with all our littles tucked under-covers and my baby hushed within my arms, far from windows and the howling outdoors, the storm was my sermon of loss and of awesome Holiness an unexplainable serenity within the turmoil of grief that can only be felt with the hope heaven offers and the beautiful spiritual promise that ‘to be absent of body is to be present with Christ’.

We do not grieve without comfort. The deep of our grief is the testimony of Grant’s pillars of friendship, guidance and care in our lives.

His life was a gift given and poured out for God, us and a great many others.

He will always be loved.