Lately I’ve been thinking about my grandmother.
There’s something about these early spring days that reminds me of her. I’m not sure whether it’s because it was spring when we said goodbye to her, but this time of year always brings back memories for me.
When I was growing up, Grandma would arrive for dinner at our townhouse in Rodgers Forge, lighting up the whole house with her smile and her conversation. She had stories to share, and she wanted to hear about everything in our lives. Sometimes I would sit and watch Jeopardy with her, marveling at how many answers she knew, enjoying hard candies from the metal tins she always seemed to have around.
We didn’t eat in restaurants much when I was a child, but if we did, Grandma was with us. She loved to eat out, and I remember how one day we went, just the two of us, to Hutzler’s for lunch. I sat with her and drank a glass of extremely chocolatey milk and felt so important.
Grandma was always present. She never missed a birthday, she was on all our vacations and at all our holiday celebrations, and we often went to Mass with her in the chapel at Good Samaritan Hospital in Baltimore. She was warm and friendly and loving to everyone, people she knew and people she was just getting to know. She was one of the people who showed me how to live a faith-filled life – and how to do it with love, understanding and compassion.
In the chaos of childhood, there are times when a child might feel misunderstood or even unseen, but I never felt that with Grandma. I always knew that she loved me completely. I was her namesake, and I loved that we shared that connection. On Christmas Day, as we worked our way through the packages under the tree, we were “Big Rita” and “Little Rita.” One year I opened a gift designated for “Rita” and pulled out a sweater that was much too big for my 6- or 7-year-old self, and we all laughed.
But even though I felt we had a special connection with our shared name, I am certain each of her grandchildren believed that she loved them in a special way too. Because she did. That was how Grandma was. She had the talent for making you feel that you were the most important person to her, and she made friends and connections wherever she went.
I like to think that is how God loves us, too. He loves us for who we are, fully and completely. He has no one he loves more than us, and no one he loves less. Each of us is his favorite, a unique creation, a person he created for a specific purpose on earth – an individual without whom he knew the universe would not be complete.
As we reflect on the glory of Easter and sit with the extraordinary realization that Jesus was victorious over death, we see that he died for us. He died for sinners. He died for people with everything and people with nothing. He died for everyone – for you and for me. It’s awesome. It’s humbling. It’s true.
And there is no greater love.
When my grandmother passed away in 1991, my sister Shaileen wrote a poem about her for the funeral program. One line that has stayed with me all these years was, “I will miss being loved so proudly.” That line still makes me a little teary.
There is nothing like being loved so completely and with so much pride. How blessed we are to experience a taste of divine love through the people we encounter in our lives on earth – as we continue our journey toward heaven.
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