Are you…?” Tara stopped and stared at me with an open mouth. “Are…you…kidding…me?!”

All of the sleep that had been in Tara’s eyes at the restaurant was now nowhere to be seen.

“An angel! An honest-to-goodness angel?” she asked a bit too loudly. We had been standing just inside the front door of our house as I finished up this portion of my story.

“Shut up!” She gave me an excited shove with both of her hands to my chest. “No way!”

So, there you have it, my bride can be just a bit unstable at times.

“Umm…Tara, you do realize that you’re more excited about an angel than you were about Jesus. I mean, ‘Joshua’.”

I could see that my assertion registered quickly and she worked to curb her enthusiasm. That’s not to say that she succeeded.

“Yeah, all right. I see your point,” she said. Then in a forced, hushed voice, with another burst of excitement she said, “But an angel!”

I laughed out loud, already knowing that there was no chance that our kids could have slept through our noise.

“So…?” she asked.

“So…? I asked.

“What happened?” Again, she playfully—I think it was playfully—slapped an open hand against my chest.

“I thought you were sleepy.”

“I was. Now I’m not.”

I chuckled again.

“You really want to know what happened?”

I got hit…again.

“You’re not going to stop doing that, are you?” I asked with mock annoyance.

“Once you tell me what happened next, I’ll consider it.”

“Good. What happened next…was that I woke up. Another night had passed. It was the day of my mamaw’s funeral.”

Tara’s eyes went from excited to disappointed to sympathetic in about four seconds. She walked up to me, lifted herself up on her toes, and kissed me on the cheek. Then she took my right hand in both of hers and led me to our couch in the living room.

“So,” she began, both softly and matter-of-factly, “this would end up being the day of your final goodbye.”

Nodding my head slowly, I felt the sorrow of that day once again weigh down on my chest.

“I remember that it was a morning in which lack of sleep was very apparent on, and in, everyone. It just added to the feeling of loss that we were all experiencing. Half smiles appeared at times, but only as sympathetic courtesies to others who were feeling the same pain. There wasn’t to be any joy for anyone on this long day.

“Initially, I felt a little bit guilty upon seeing the fatigue in everyone’s face. I had gotten a full night’s sleep, though unbeknownst to anyone there, my sleeping hours had been as active as—actually, much more so than—any of my waking hours.

“I stood staring out the front door of the farmhouse, looking out over the porch into the grass where all my relatives’ cars were parked. Then I looked past them to the end of the driveway. In another hour, the hearse would again pull onto the property.

“I felt a pair of arms wrap around my waist from behind, followed by a head that rested against my back. It was my sister.”

BRENT FELT LYDIA lay her head against his back. She sniffled.

“Mom & Uncle Dave just closed the casket.”

Brent nodded silently.

“At first, I thought there might be some comfort having her back in her own home,” she said. “But last night and today, all I’ve done is avoid the living room. Something’s wrong with her just lying there. It’s unnerving. Even a bit …creepy.”

Brent could tell that she struggled with ending her sentence that way, but he was able to identify with her word choice. He had been enduring the same feelings.

“She’s not supposed to be creepy, Brent.” Lydia’s voice broke. “She’s my mamaw.”

Lydia’s body began to quake against Brent’s back. He had already begun to feel her tears soak through his white dress shirt.

Brent’s brow pinched and his eyes closed as he tried to rein back his own emotions. He didn’t want to be strong, but he also didn’t want Lydia having to concern herself with his grief. He started to turn around, and Lydia released her grip. Facing her, she looked up into his eyes with deep anguish.

The last time he had seen her this way had been nine years prior. She had been standing in his bedroom waiting for him to enter. He had just been in a loud and angry fight with his parents, and she had been so scared. She thought that he had gone from being her protector to that of being a third household combatant, abandoning her to endure the screaming and yelling alone.

He had been her rock during the worst of their parents’ fights. Here she was, now an adult, and she still looked to him for some measure of comfort.

Brent wrapped his arms around Lydia. She laid her head on his chest, and he kissed the crown of her head.

Just then, Sharon Lawton walked out of the living room and into the hallway in which they stood. When she turned toward the doorway and saw her children’s embrace, her eyes became even more sorrowful. Her right hand swept upward to cover her mouth in an attempt to restrain a pained sob. She looked at the two of them for only a couple of seconds before retreating down the hall and into the kitchen.

Brent held on to his sister for another minute as he made a decision. He didn’t want to suffer through the next hour in silent agony. With his chin resting lightly on Lydia’s head, he asked, “Want to go outside? I want to tell you something.”

“Okay,” she said with a whisper.

They broke their embrace and Brent opened the door for her.

Another day of sunshine. Somehow it seemed wrong that the hills of Kentucky were not blanketed in cloud cover, mist, and rain. It occurred to Brent that the rest of the world would be unaffected by the events that his family would endure throughout the day.

The two walked out to the far side of the house where the apple trees stood. Brent chose the first tree in the single row of five and sat down in its shade. Brent leaned back on his hands, extended his feet out into the grass before him, and crossed his legs. Lydia, in a calf-length black skirt and white blouse chose her spot a little more carefully, then sat down facing him, her bent knees resting modestly at her side in the grass.

As soon as Lydia looked comfortable, Brent spoke. “I’ve been hating God.”

There, thought Brent, blunt and right out in the open.

Lydia’s answer caught him unprepared. “I know. Me, too.”

Brent’s focus spun 180-degrees from himself with the revelation. “You?”

“Yeah. I haven’t felt it as long as you have, though.”

180-degrees back.

“You already knew how I felt?”

“Brent, everyone knows how you feel. If you’ve been trying to hide it, you failed.”

180.

“I didn’t know you felt the same way.”

“My hate didn’t exist until Uncle Joe told us about how Mamaw died. Up to that point, I had only been heartbroken. Maybe a little bit of disappointment with God, but still believing that he cared.”

“Now you don’t believe? You don’t believe that he cares?”

Lydia looked away from Brent. She appeared to be looking behind him, at one of three gardens on the Moore property. It was a long time before she responded.

“I want to believe that he does. But to just let someone die the way that she did? Someone who loved him so much? I mean… Really?”

Brent could hear the anger beginning to surface.

His thoughts swung back to his uncle’s description of how his mamaw had died. Now he tried to couple those details with the things that Joshua had told him. He may not exactly hate God anymore, but Brent still didn’t see the point of letting his grandmother die the way she did.

A thought came to him. While walking in the ‘board room,’ Joshua had given him an answer that he hadn’t fully thought through. What he had initially refuted was beginning to make a little bit of sense.

“We don’t know Mamaw’s story,” Brent said in a near whisper.

“What?”

“Something… Something a friend recently told me. It makes sense to me now. At least a little.”

Lydia looked at him—into him—her eyes seeking a cure for the damage done to her soul.

“It took taking my thoughts off of myself in order to see it. Because of your pain, and because I want to help…I think I got a little bit of perspective.”

“Can you share some of it with me? I could certainly use it.”

“I’m not going to say that this is the whole answer. I’m not even going to say that I like it. Okay? I’m still mad. I still think God could have done something different. But…what if God needed all of us here now? What if Mamaw’s purpose was not only to live her life as a benefit to others…” Brent was startled by the words that were about to roll off his tongue. “…but for her death to be that, as well?”

Brent could tell that Lydia wasn’t buying it even before she spoke. “How could Mamaw’s death be a benefit, Brent? How? How could breaking a leg and bleeding to death be a benefit to anyone?”

Anger grew in her eyes. Brent had thought—had hoped—that his words would have had the opposite effect, but apparently he hadn’t thought things through well enough before speaking.

“Okay. I…I don’t exactly know how. Not yet, anyway. But God knew Mamaw’s story. He knew what her purpose was, and he knew why he kept her on Earth for the length of time that he did. I’m just saying that maybe there’s an impact that Mamaw’s death, not just her life, is supposed to have on some of us—or maybe even just one of us—to help us in our life stories as we go on.”

Lydia had had enough. She lifted herself to one knee, then stood up. She looked Brent in the eyes and said, “That didn’t help, Brent. Not one bit.”

Without giving Brent the opportunity to respond, she walked away and rounded the house toward the front porch.

Brent thought through the words he had just spoken. He knew, now, that he hadn’t made much sense with what he’d said. He tried to think it through again, but gave up. Maybe Lydia was right. Maybe he was trying to reason out something for which none of them would ever have a satisfying explanation. He had used a number of “what ifs” and “maybes” in what he had tried to explain to his sister, and unfortunately, their sum didn’t add up to anything even close to a worthwhile answer. Not even for him.