It Was My Grandmother's And I Lost It

She cut it off her own plant and put it in a jam jar of water for you.

You remember the jar. You remember that she did not make anything of it, because she never did, and that she said something about how it would root in a couple of weeks and you would have your own.

And then she died, and the cutting was still on your counter.

And you looked after that thing with a care that had nothing to do with horticulture, and it went brown at the bottom, and about five weeks later it was plainly finished.

And something in you broke that was completely out of proportion to a piece of a plant in a jar.

Let me say what I think happened, because I think you have not put it in words and it has been sitting in you unworded for a long time.

You had decided, without ever deciding it, that she was in there.

Not literally. You would never say that out loud and you would be embarrassed to have it said back to you. But functionally, in the way a person actually lives, that jar had become the place where she still was, and keeping it alive had become the job of keeping her.

So when it went, it did not feel like a plant. It felt like the second one.

You are not holding her in a plant, and a cutting that failed has never once been able to take a person away from you a second time.

Yet will I not forget thee

There is a line in Isaiah where God reaches for the strongest human bond He can find and then says He is stronger than it.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. (Isaiah 49:15, King James Version)

Look at how far He goes to find the comparison.

He does not pick friendship. He does not pick a promise or a contract. He picks a nursing mother and a newborn, which is about the least forgettable relationship there is, and then He says even that one can slip, and mine will not.

You are being held by a remembering that Scripture could not find a human equal for, and the strongest bond anybody could think of has never once been the ceiling of it. Isaiah 49:15 reaches for a nursing mother and then goes past her, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient comparison land on a woman looking at an empty jar.

Now here is why that verse belongs in this kitchen.

The keeping of your grandmother is not your job.

That is the whole weight that settled in when the cutting went brown. Somewhere in the five weeks it was dying, the task quietly transferred, and it became your responsibility to hold onto her, and the plant was the instrument.

And you failed at an instrument you were never issued.

You were never assigned the keeping of somebody you loved, and a task that was never given to you has never once been a task you could fail. The Holy Spirit is the one who does the remembering that no object was ever able to do, and the written word puts the not forgetting entirely on God's side of the sentence.

And notice the tense of it. Yet will I not forget thee. Present and continuing. Not I remembered her, past, filed away. The verse describes an ongoing act, happening now, while you stand at a counter with an empty jar in your hand.

You are standing inside a remembering that is going on at this moment, and a person you love has never once depended on your grip to stay held. The word says I will not forget and puts no condition on it whatsoever, and the Spirit of God is the one doing that holding while you are not able to.

What actually carries her

Let me be practical, because grief responds better to practical than to comfort.

Think about what you actually have of your grandmother.

There is the way she said things. There are her hands doing something, probably in a kitchen. There is a smell nobody could name that arrives out of nowhere twice a year. And there is the fact that she did not make anything of the cutting, because she never made anything of anything, and that is a whole personality in one detail.

None of that was in the jar.

You have been carrying her in a dozen places that no plant could hold, and a woman like that has never once been small enough to fit in a jam jar. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person alive in the details rather than in an object, and Isaiah 49:15 puts the remembering somewhere far more durable than a windowsill.

And I want to say something about the cutting itself, because there is a mercy in it that you have not looked at.

She gave you the cutting because that is what she did. She gave pieces of things away constantly, off the plants on her own sill. There are probably four other people with pieces of that same plant, and some of theirs died too, and she would not have thought about it for a second.

The giving was the point. The giving is what she was like. And the giving already happened.

You have already received the whole of what she handed across that counter, and a piece of a plant has never once been the thing she was actually giving you. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a completed kindness completed, and the written word speaks of a compassion that does not depend on anything surviving.

Say her name and keep the jar

So here is the assignment, and it has two halves.

Say her name out loud. Once. In the kitchen.

Not a prayer, unless you want it to be. Just her name, said out loud, in the room where the jar was.

I am asking for this because the whole trouble has been that she has been getting held by an object instead of by you, and an object is silent. Saying a name is the opposite of that. It puts her back into the room through your own voice, which is where she actually lives.

You are able to put her name into a room with your own mouth, and a person has never once been better kept by a plant than by being said out loud. Isaiah 49:15 is God speaking about not forgetting rather than displaying an object, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in a kitchen while a woman says a name to nobody.

And the second half. Keep the jar.

Do not throw it out. Do not put a new cutting in it either, not yet, because that would make the new one a replacement and it would carry the same job the last one did.

Wash it and put it back in the cupboard with the other jars.

You are allowed to keep an ordinary object without giving it a job, and a jar has never once needed to be either a shrine or a thing thrown away. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets an object go back to being an object, and the word puts the whole of the remembering on God, which takes it off the glass.