Till Death Do Us Part

My daughter has been dating a wonderful young man for about a year now.  It wasn’t very long after they began dating that we discovered that we are related.  Being from Mississippi, that didn’t come as much of a shock, especially since it was from my Shake Rag side of the family.  It turned out that his great, great Aunt Hortense was married to my great Uncle Earl.  It’s a small world, I guess, at least in Mississippi. 

We began talking about this in the family circle and a story surfaced that I had never heard before.  It turns out that Uncle Earl had been married twice.  His first wife had died and he married Aunt Hortense, the only aunt of the two that I ever knew.  Now Uncle Earl was a practical man so when his first wife died, he bought a double plot in the cemetery at Boone’s Chapel Methodist Church in Shake Rag.  Boone’s Chapel Cemetery is where all my relatives are buried going back to the 1800’s.  You can’t step over a grave without stepping over a cousin or aunt or uncle.  My grandparents are there along with others that weren’t relatives but probably thought they were.  So, when Uncle Earl went on to his reward it was only natural that he would be buried beside his first wife.  In fact, it was his request, being the practical man that he was. 

Practical or not, Aunt Hortense was livid.  She had given him the best years of her life and she should be the wife that Uncle Earl found his eternal home next to.  Aunt Hortense just couldn’t let it rest, so to speak.  So she went and found a grader blade.  A grader blade is that long steel blade you see on road graders and is used to smooth road foundations.  They seem to be about 6 feet long and about 3 feet tall.  I can’t imagine how much it must weigh.  Aunt Hortense wrestled that huge piece of flat steel up to the Boone’s Chapel Cemetary along with a sledge hammer.  She took the blade and put it between Uncle Earl and his first wife and began pounding.  She beat that thing until it served as a suitable divide between him and “her”.  Forever.

I’m sure Aunt Hortense was a good Baptist as was most of my Shake Rag family.  She would have known about the gospel story where Jesus is quizzed by the Sadducees trying to catch him in a misstep.  They want to trap Jesus by basically asking if we will have more than one spouse in heaven if we had more than one on earth.  Jesus’ response was that it wasn’t important. 

Now, I like to think that Jana will be waiting on me in heaven one day, or that I’ll be waiting on her.  I want to think that the relationship will truly be beyond “till death do us part.”  But, I can’t count on it.  What I can count on is that we will all be joyfully received into the kingdom, into the loving Creator’s arms, surrounded by the Spirit, and greeted by the living Christ.  There we will live, truly live, and we will love like we have never loved or been loved before.  That, I can count on.  Grader blades or not. 

Forever.