grandpa's heart

This past week we got to sneak away and go up to visit grandpa in the hospital in Idaho Falls. On Thursday night, Keith and I ran up to see him without the girls. He looked so pale and frail, it really was hard to see him like that. When we got back to mom and dad's house, we were telling the girls how he was doing. I explained about the oxygen tubes, nothing we haven't ever encountered before, his "white as a ghost" skin, and how his heart wasn't working very well. Well, Shawnie had just BEGGED me earlier in the week when I was trying to decide when to go, to let her come because "I don't care about anything, my grandpa needs me to be with him!" Those would be her exact words. So I waited for a couple of days so that she and Sari could come with me. So Friday morning the girls and I headed up to the hospital. Shawnie was really nervous all the way up there that she was going to cry when she saw him. She kept asking me what "white as a ghost" meant. We talked about keeping a smile on our faces for grandpa's sake, and by the time we got to the hospital, she was pretty excited to see him. As we approached the door to his room, though, she completely freaked out and started trying to drive away. I had to pick her up out of her chair and carry her in to see him. She hid her face in my shoulder all the way in the room, she had decided that she just wasn't strong enough to do it. When we got in, grandpa said "Hi Shawnie!" just like he always does, and she was fine. He coughed and coughed and she thought it was so funny every time he cleared his throat and spit. We had a wonderful visit with him, I was so grateful to have been able to be there. As soon as we left the room, Shawnie said "Whew!" I told her that I was so proud of her for facing her fears and making it such a great experience for all of us. She was really troubled though, and as we talked as I put her in the car, she said, "I imagined he would be mean because his heart wasn't working!" We then were blessed with the opportunity to have the most beautiful conversation about our physical hearts and our spirit hearts. Grandpa has one of the kindest spirit hearts I've ever been blessed to know, and even though his physical heart is struggling to keep his body going, his spirit heart is just as strong as it ever was and ever will be. We talked about all the things that grandpa has done his whole life to make his spirit heart strong and how lucky he is to be able to keep it with him. We talked about people who don't take care of their spirit heart and get mean and grouchy and how they get to keep it with them when they die as well. We were able to decide together that we wanted to have hearts like grandpa's. I'm so grateful that the Lord blessed us with this opportunity to reflect together on grandpa's heart and I'm especially grateful to grandpa for the example that his heart has always been to me and to these girls of mine.