Copyright 2/10/2020
Chapter 1
I’ve always loved butterflies. There’s something magical about how they hatch, how the change from squishy caterpillars to the jewel-toned beauties happens, how they choose the tiniest weed flowers and most outlandishly colored bougainvillea to visit, and how they can dance and flutter at will.
Now that I have my new body and live in this magnificent paradise called heaven, I’m glad to know there are still butterflies to delight me, but here they live in that transformed state of eternal beauty. No more do they crawl, like the evil serpent in the Eden garden was forced to do. No longer do they go through the painful cocoon stage, or emerge, transfixed, wondering what just happened.
There is no pain here, no anxiety, no sense of dread or questioning why things happen. Just as God promised me, and I only weakly understood, God wipes away every tear, restores everything to beauty. I can walk again. I can see inside, outside, the whole panorama of beauty just as God planned it in the beginning. I can sing Hallelujahs in tune, I can join with my son who has joined me here in paradise, and we can walk and talk and embrace and know we’re in the most amazing relationship we’ve ever had. With his dad, my beloved Loren, I thrive in our togetherness. No, not in marriage anymore, for that was certainly not total perfection like I know here, but just knowing that relationships are sanctified, that we know and love each other perfectly, that we can talk with the prophets and the clouds of witnesses who spoke truth to us in the other place. Yes, this truly is paradise.
And the best part, even language is unnecessary here. We never grope for words. As I writer, I was plagued with that frustration. It’s all gone. And now we can review our life-moments and see why things happened as they did.
We know our purpose here is to worship the Lord and revel in His majesty. All else fades into subjection to our joy in knowing we’re in the right place, we have no need to satisfy our personal desires. God has done it all, just as He promised.
I wish I could tell my fellow believers on earth that resurrection is real, that indeed there are no tears, there’s no pain of cancer, there’s no demanded separation from those we love, there is only the sweet reward Jesus promised. While I have plenty of company here, I eagerly wait to embrace my other three children, my gorgeous grandchildren who must find their own way through life with the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and my great grandchildren whom I never got to cuddle and promise my love.
I suppose you’re wondering why my life story warrants all these words. It’s because while we’re living life, the day to day, the birth to death, the restrictions of time and place, we were so very limited, so tied to what I now call the mundane, the affairs of the world, that we couldn’t get the butterflies’ perspective.
We forget where we’re going, we lose our way, but I see things so differently now. I remember reading St. Paul’s words which said that someday, meaning now, we would see things clearly. (By the way, we’ve met and talk sometimes. I love to hear him tell about his adventures, especially how God sustained him through the shipwrecks and the storms he knew in the old days) It’s delightful to see why things happened back then.
I hate divorce. It is not God’s way, I know. For me it meant tears, a feeling of abandonment, tears and more tears, and people coming and going in my life that I didn’t know, and relationships that made me anxious.
My mother had three husbands; my father had two wives. The only constant in my life was Grandmother Ross. I didn’t know any other grandmothers.
Now I know why my sainted grandmother, who now lives right next door in my mansion here in heaven, pretty much had to raise me. I didn’t know back then why everybody called me Sis. Was it because they didn’t like my name, Bessie? I didn’t like it either, to tell the truth.
Grandmother told me the other day that Buddy, my brother who was only a year older than me, couldn’t say Bess. B’s are hard for little kids to say. So he called me Sis, and after that, everyone else did. But I’ve learned that when people don’t know your name, they don’t know you. Maybe that’s the way they wanted it.
I know my father didn’t want me. He left when I was two. No Christmas presents, no birthday cards, no contact until I was about to start high school.
When I was seven, mother married Bruce Garland. I don’t remember much about him. Guess I was busy going to school, but we were in a place near Corpus Christi called Flour Bluff, Texas. Oh, I remember that place. Dusty, hot, and I missed Grandmother’s hugs.
I remember stuffing cardboard in my shoes, if I was fortunate enough to get a pair that year, so the Texas sun-drenched stones didn’t scorch my feet. I remember the feed-sack dresses and how they scratched my skin. I remember eating grits three times a day. I remember the relentless teasing at school, and the teacher yelling because I had no pencil or I couldn’t find a paper bag to cover my arithmetic book.
I remember lunch was a stick of jerky Grandpa Ross had managed to buy for his own lunch and divided it in half, sort of, for Buddy and me. Buddy got the bigger half. He was the boy and needed to grow up big and strong.
Then Grandmother taught me to think of Jesus whose disciples, fishermen by trade, had to ply their trade every day or they didn’t eat. I know what it feels like to go to bed, go to school, go out to play, go to church and hear my stomach grumble with hunger.
Even Buddy abandoned me. When he was seven or so, he didn’t want his little sister tagging along with him. When he got a bike, who knows where that came from, I was so envious. True, I had roller skates to clamp onto my shoes, but when the soles of my shoes were shredded, even the skate key couldn’t keep them from falling off.
I had perpetual scarred knees. Grandmother used pine tar on me, lots of pine tar, so now I didn’t know if I was peeling scabs or stuck on poultices from my bare knees. Everybody saw what a klutz I was. Finally, I stopped skating.
When Grandmother reminded me that all we needed was Jesus, the Bread of Life, she meant it. How’s a ten-year-old supposed to know about metaphors? That wisdom came much later.
My grandmother always told me that things happen to us be God’s design. She was a very devout Christian, and I remember her spending a good deal of time in prayer. She would sit in her old creaky rocking chair with her apron pulled up over her head, and I knew that was praying time.
She taught me all the Bible stories, she made them sound like great adventures. I’m sure that’s how I learned to write the stories I did say later in life.
Buddy had moved on to work at a hunting and fishing camp with our stepdad Garland. and I was sent back to live with Grandmother. I didn’t see much of my brother after that.
But I cried every night, curled up fetal position on my little cot in the sewing room. I was tall enough now that my feet hung over the iron bar at the foot of the cot.
When I was sixteen or so, I became Bessie. Here’s what happened. In 1923 my father married Elizabeth Lang. She was thirty-eight when he married her. She wanted nothing to do with children. I remember her hands, long elegant fingers, always polished, with sparkling diamonds.
She tried to teach me to be a lady, a very hard task. She was unlike any other woman I had ever known.
My father sent for me this letter dated December 28, 1933, just before my seventeenth birthday. He was in New Orleans.
Dearest Sis—
We received your nice letter today and were so glad to hear from you, and to know that you had a good Christmas.
Since writing you we have devised a scheme by which you may come here to go to school if you want to. Even though you would probably lose two weeks of school, we think you would be in a much better school here and you could take the subjects which you would need to take up the nursing profession if that is what you would like to follow. The schools here are beyond question the best ones in the South, and after you have finished high school, we are in a position to be able to exert some influence toward your getting in either one of the two largest hospitals here by knowing several of the leading surgeons here quite well. Aunt Bess would be a great help to you in that work, and we believe it would be the best thing you could possibly do.
If this strikes you favorably, and we sincerely hope it will for your own good, let us know and by return mail we will send you a ticket to come over.
You will have to have a list of credits from your present school, about which I will go into in detail in the next letter if you decide to come.
What grade are you now in? This is only a note written hurriedly at 11 p.m. today, so let us know at once, and we will arrange the balance.
Lots of love to you and Buddy, and please write a soon as possible.
Yours lovingly, Dad.
Grandmother urged me to go. She knew nothing about higher education. She had finished sixth grade, I think. So I went.
Just as I was getting settled in, my father accepted a new job in upstate New York. Talk about a culture shock. I entered high school in 1934. I was older than my classmates, stuck out like a sore thumb with my southern accent and backward ways, and struggled with academics as well. While Aunt Bess did her best to teach me manners and etiquette, and a favorite teacher, Miss Hughes (bless her. I found her again here in heaven and thanked her repeatedly) took me under her generous wing and tutored me most afternoons so I could read and write as well as her other students.
By the time I was a junior, after the first people who bullied me terribly had graduated, I was not only accepted, but admired. My accent was fading a bit, and I took on a leadership role by beginning a home economics club, and as a real honor, I was on the Junior Prom committee. I had discovered I enjoyed learning about cooking and sewing,. Meanwhile, Dad was still encouraging me to consider nursing as a career. As a senior, I was accepted into the Hudson City Hospital School of Nursing.
And then, as Loren and I were remembering the other day, we met at church. He tells me he was supposed to marry Marjorie, a family friend. But when he saw my grey-blue eyes and heard my southern drawl, he knew he had found his wife-to-be.
Dad despised him. Called him every name in the book, forbade me to see him, and thought he had no future. I never could confide in Aunt Bess. She was distant and obviously under my strong Dad’s influence. When I had finished my first year of nurse’s training, and my sweet Loren had gotten a meager raise in ay at Pitcher Accessories, we asked his brother Ken and his wife Nettie to stand up for us, and we were married in our pastor’s office. Dr. Murphy agreed to marry us over both sets of parents’ admonitions, and we began our life together on 9.9.39. Very soon thereafter, in the end of June (yes, people were counting their fingers!) I was born, perhaps so that I could tell their story.
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