Do you remember when you first learned you were going to die?

I was five years old. It began with a phone call in the middle of the night and the sound of my mother weeping. I don’t think I had ever seen my mom cry. She had slumped to the floor beneath the wall phone with the cord around her body and she was sobbing. They had found my grandfather beside a tractor on his farm in Nebraska, dead from a heart attack at 54 years of age.

I did not understand what was happening. Over the blur of the next 24 hours, I learned about death and a funeral. I would be left behind with Sister Littlejohn, an older woman who attended the church that my Dad pastored. (In the South, the adults in your church were always “Brother” or “Sister.”)

I often had gone to her house on Sunday afternoons after church. She had never had children and she loved me as if I were her own grandchild for all the years my father served in that church. She was tiny and frail with hair that was still coal black. She wore flowered dresses that hung almost to her ankles, and she always smelled like roses.

Everything about that week is etched in my memory. She taught me to make potholders with stretchy loops of fabric on a tiny loom and made fresh squeezed orange juice each morning with buttered toast that she made in a cast iron skillet. I must remember it all so clearly because of the trauma of losing my grandad and the shock of my new reality. We die.

I think I was his favorite. We lived in Memphis. Mom and I would go to stay with them at their farm in Nebraska in the summers. And then when I was four, I spent my first summer there alone. Grandma was about five foot and Grandad so very tall. I’m sure not as tall as my five-year-old memory recalls but tall and handsome with a leathery sunburned face and white forehead from wearing his hat every day in the fields. His glasses were always at the end of his nose and his work trousers were held up by suspenders and smelled of machine oil. He had the kindest green eyes and large rough hands that would stroke my hair when I leaned up against him. He took Sunday afternoon naps on the couch and his laugh was quiet and frequent!

Grandad was a grain farmer with hundreds of acres of corn and wheat. My grandmother would spend her mornings cooking huge meals that she would pack up and take to the fields at lunchtime for my grandfather and the harvest crew. I would go with her to deliver lunch, and while I was there, I would beg to ride on the wagon pulled behind the combine as it captured the grains of wheat being ripped from their stalks. Grandad would tie a rope around my waist and let me sit on the seat behind the driver. The rope was there to haul me out of the deep chaffy grain in the wagon if I accidentally fell in. Because of my trust for this mountain of man it never crossed my mind to be afraid. My lifelong love of coffee began that summer when he would pour coffee into his saucer and sneak it to me, while my grandma would scold him, warning it would stunt my growth.

I adored him … my grandfather. And he was gone. He was dead. And I would never see him again. It was in this growing realization that as a five-year-old, I began to wrestle with the concept of mortality. On one of the afternoons of my stay with the Littlejohns, I crawled under the low-hanging boughs of a magnificent tall Gardenia bush in their front yard. It was in full bloom with giant glossy green leaves and huge fragrant creamy-white blooms. The fragrance of the gardenias hung heavy in the air of my hiding place under those boughs. I don’t remember how long I was there alone crying when Sister Littlejohn found me. That little bird of a woman hiked up her skirt and crawled in and sat beside me.

She wrapped her arms around me and spoke to me of heaven. She told me of the wonderful place that grandad had gone to and that someday we would be there too. And most wonderful of all was that Jesus would be there. To this day when I smell gardenias, I think of heaven.

My spiritual journey began that day with the wisdom that only death can bring. The wisdom that this world is not my home.