Sabbath Devotional :: Gratitude
“The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for everything.” — Albert Schweitzer
I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot this week. She died around this time of year, a few days after Thanksgiving, twenty years ago. She was only 69. Way too young to die.
I still think of her almost every day, but especially during this season of Thanksgiving.
My mother was the finest woman I have ever known.
She was born in Manti, Utah on July 13, 1928, and grew up on a homestead in the Uintah Basin. Her father was bishop of the Arcadia, Utah ward for the first 15 years of her life, and her mother was Relief Society president for most of that time. My mother served a full-time mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the late 1940s, at a time when sister missionaries were as rare as snow angels in Arizona. After her mission, she married a handsome boy from town who was home on leave from the Navy. Together they had seven children (I’m number five). When my youngest sister was just six months old, my father was killed in a mining accident. Four months later, my oldest brother, age 14, drowned while trying to retrieve a duck he had shot down over a large pond.
And so, at age 39, my mother found herself a widow. The loss of her beloved oldest son just weeks later threatened to completely undo her, but she had six children still to care for, ranging in age from 12 years down to six months. And so she carried on. And she made it work.
Two of my mother’s favorite sayings were: “There’s no such thing as ‘can’t’ in my vocabulary,” and “Hide and watch!”
One year, in order to help supplement our meager food supply, mom purchased a flock of hens and one feisty rooster. We enjoyed fresh eggs all spring and summer, but as winter approached, mom decided to butcher half of the hens for our freezer. As she went about setting up stations and making assignments (my brothers were to catch the hens and chop off their heads; my oldest sister was to throw the headless chickens in a pot of boiling water to scald them; and then my mother and I were to pluck, gut, and wrap them in butcher paper), I timidly asked: “Mom, do you know how to do this?”
“No,” she said cheerily. “But I’m about to learn!”
That was mom. (I also have stories about pigs, steers, and skunks, if you’re interested.)
But the thing I most associate with my mother (besides pure, open-hearted love) is gratitude.
Despite everything, despite devastating loss and poverty and relentless challenges, she was always grateful.
I was in my early thirties, with four small children, when mom was first diagnosed with the cancer that ultimately took her life. She immediately underwent a double mastectomy, followed by radiation and several brutal rounds of chemotherapy which left her weak, sick, and completely bald. It also wreaked havoc on her spine which necessitated emergency back surgery just days after her final chemo treatment. We had a hospital bed delivered to our home and set up in our daughter’s bedroom where Mom convalesced for the next several months. It was one of the great privileges of my life to be able to care for my mother during this period. My favorite time of day was early morning when everyone else was still asleep. I would take mom her breakfast (usually a steaming bowl of oatmeal with raisins and cinnamon and a side of grapefruit, no sugar) and sit and talk with her before administering her medications (including a shot in her thigh, the giving of which made me quake internally no matter how many times I did it). And then we would start the long, painful, laborious process of getting her into the post-op compression brace that she had to wear whenever she got up (three times a day) to go to the bathroom and to do the excruciating but necessary walk down the hall and through all the upstairs bedrooms and then back to her bed.
One day as she was eating her breakfast, quite out of the blue, she said: “I’m so grateful that I don’t have any hair.” I looked at her in surprise. “Grateful? Why?” I said. “Oh, gracious, can you image how matted my hair would get with me just lying around in bed all day!” she said.
That was my mom. Like Corrie Ten Boom’s sister Betsy who gave thanks for the fleas that allowed them as prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp to hold Bible study because the guards wouldn’t enter the barracks (because of the fleas) and like Paul of old, my mother had learned, in whatsoever state she was, therewith to be content.
My mother was given three more relatively good years after this first round with cancer, but then it returned, with a vengeance. During a routine checkup, it was discovered that the cancer had metastasized and had invaded both her lungs and her brain. She was given just weeks. I was gutted. I had a quiet, private moment with her shortly after she’d received this prognosis. “Mom,” I said. “How are you feeling about all this? Really?”
Her answer is forever etched upon my heart. “Oh,” she said. “I’m feeling grateful mostly, I guess. And a little excited.”
Grateful? Excited? Neither of those were words I’d expected.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Well, grateful that I’ve had such a good life. Such a good, good life.” She paused. “And a little excited because, well . . .” She looked straight at me then. “Sweetie,” she said. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen your daddy?”
When she died, just a few months later, we let each of her grandchildren choose something from her house to remember her by — a knick-knack, a toy, a book, a photograph. Our oldest daughter, age 12, knew immediately what she wanted. It was a little sign, written on a scrap of paper in my mother’s own shaky handwriting and sticky-tacked to her bedroom wall. Our daughter still cherishes this piece of paper, and for all of her growing up years had it taped up in her own bedroom. It reads: “Pain is a part of life. Misery is optional.”
“To learn how to be grateful and [therefore] happy, whether hands full or hands empty. That is a secret worth spending a life on learning,” writes Ann Voskamp (author of “One Thousand Gifts,” a book I highly recommend).
If there is a secret to happiness, then that secret is gratitude. It really is. It is gratitude — genuine, bone-deep gratitude, born of humility, awareness, attention, practice, and an acknowledgement of grace — that brings peace and leads us to joy. There is no other way.
Thanks, Mom, for teaching me this.
Sharlee Mullins Glenn is a founding member of Mormon Women for Ethical Government.
