Twenty-Five Years.

It was yesterday. And it was a lifetime ago.

Today marks twenty-five years since my Mom drew her last breath on earth and awoke in eternity. Twenty-five years since her cancer-ravaged body was finally, ultimately, gloriously made new.

As I’ve reflected this week on that moment and the countless moments since, I toggle between it just happened and how on earth has it been so long?

It just happened because I see her legacy lived out in dozens of different ways. Her presence still looms large in her family. She has children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren whose worldviews, whose very lives are different because of their Mimi.

It has been so long because so many highs and lows and in-betweens of life have been crammed into the last quarter-century. Things and people and events that are such a real and tangible part of my life, yet never seen by my Mom’s earthly eyes.

She had two toddling grandsons who are now grown men. Another grandson and granddaughter she never held. A daughter-in-law who has taken on her mantle of Mimi. Three granddaughters-in-law she would have adored and they would’ve adored right back. And four great-grandchildren….my goodness. There are not enough plane tickets that would have sufficed to fill her arms with those babies and the ones still to come. One even bears her name, a fitting honor for a heritage like hers.

And that’s just my small chapter in the book that is her family. The last quarter century has carried joys and sorrows too broad and too deep to fathom: more great-grandchildren than she could’ve kept up with (though she’d desperately try). The aging and departing of dear friends. The changes in her church, her city, her society. The sale of the family business she’d known for all of her married life and then some. The substantial answers to prayers she’d prayed for decades.

There have been reunifications. Since she’s passed, she’s been joined by friends and by siblings and by her own mom and by the love of her life, my beloved Dad who has now been gone for more than two years. My siblings and I smile when we think of the first meeting there in heaven: what stories were told? What laughs were re-laughed?

Twenty-five years have brought the strange and beautiful convergence of her children rise up and call her blessed and O death, where is your sting? and surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. Though dead, she still speaks. Though gone, her presence lingers. Though unknown by newer generations, still very much cherished.

We lost her yesterday. We lost her a lifetime ago. Yet even at twenty-five years, her eternity is just beginning.