2nd June

It’s been another highly emotional day having to focus upon the practicalities of arranging Jane’s funeral. Monday sounds a long way away but there’s still quite a bit to think about and just focussing upon that day would be far too stressful. So I’m really enjoying the changes to my home, the front room bedsit is now well established as dining/jigsaw/library room complete with it’s own sound system. My grand-children at last finished the Barcelona flower market jigsaw and started the next charity shop purchase which is an English cottage garden. More flowers but there’s not much choice… I think I’m getting old.

So today we reviewed my son-in-laws video and slide presentation for the funeral. I’ve found it quite upsetting looking at photo’s of Jane and our life together but to be confronted with a delightful video of our wedding back in 1973 and then more recent footage was seriously too much. Even my older grand-daughter joined in the sobbing. I’m ‘happy’ to do this thing called mourning properly and this is definitely part of it.

My nearly 5 year old grand-daughter started talking about the funeral saying ‘Nana will be in a box won’t she?’ It was good to be able to say that Nana wouldn’t really be in the box because she was actually in heaven with Jesus now. And it is only her old body in the box, because she has a new one now and doesn’t need this one anymore. So then my thinking grand-daughter said ‘we can’t go and visit her there can we?’ To which I replied ‘not really but one day we would though once you go to heaven you can’t come back… at least not for a long time.’ This little conversation made me feel really happy. I love my grand-kids.

Then we had to write out some cards for the flowers on the coffin at the crematorium. How on earth can you pay a proper tribute to such a lovely person on a tiny card? We all managed to say something though. And today was the deadline for choosing music for the crematorium as well, another difficult task emotionally but quite easy to actually decide. After that I had to put together a first draft of the order of service at the church… one of my daughters then tidied it up and she’ll try and get them printed tomorrow. ‘Little’ practical jobs like that help enormously, especially when I have to cope with looking at the photo of Jane on the front. She looks so wonderfully happy… but not as happy as she looks right now in the presence of our Lord Jesus!

2 Corinthians 5:1 ‘For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands.’ (NLT)