A lot to live up to

This post requires a bit of backstory.
Once you've read it, I think, indeed I hope, you will get what I am attempting to impart.
It is about my paternal grandmother.
It is about a prayer I heard her prayer one March afternoon on a windy hillside in south central Oklahoma.
My husband, my sister and I were standing with her there that day, over the grave of her only child, my dad. We were everyone devastated and exhausted. I had tried in vain to convince her to wait until another day to go back to the cemetery as we had been there just earlier that same day for Daddy's interment. She would have none of it.
While there were still guests in the house, on the same day as the funeral service and the burial, surely one of the worst of her life... she motioned to me from across a crowded room.
I went to her immediately, thinking I she probably wanted me to make excuses for her so she could take a well-deserved nap.  Not at all.
She wanted to go back out to the cemetery, more than 20 miles away. I tried to talk her out of it, citing the lateness of the day, the company still in house, the distance. She was having none of it.
I wanted to mention her age (almost 80) and my own state of exhaustion. I did not.
Instead I went dutifully to her car and waited there. She appeared in the garage with a rake, a yard broom, my husband and my baby sister. She was wearing a coat and head scarf. She voiced a single command. "Get in," she said, and we did. She drove. I am not sure why we let her. Any of us could have. It only seemed odd to me later that one of us did not slide behind the steering wheel of her big ole Chrysler.
I do not recall any conversation on that long trip to the burial site of her only child. Maybe there was none.
When we arrive, she went to the trunk and got out the gardening tools she'd brought along. She asked that we take off all the flowers that had been placed on the Daddy's grave just a few hours earlier. We obeyed without question. I don't recall it seeming odd to me at the time, though maybe it should have.
She set about raking the soil until she had removed every rock and clot of dirt. Then she laid down the rake, knelt down and began to smooth the freshly raked dirt. It was like watching a mother cover her child with a blanket. She worked until she had the plot just like she wanted it. Wordlessly. Finally, she arranged every spray and wreath the way she wanted them atop the soil.
The other three of us just stood there in disbelief. When she said "join hands" we again complied immediately. When she said "let's pray" I began to weep. It was all too much for me.
The words she said, were burned into my mind and my heart.
I can almost quote them. Her prayer went like this.
'Father God, I come to You now in this place to thank you for Johnny. I thank you for giving him to us when we'd given up hope of ever having a child. I thank you for letting me raise him. I raised him the best I knew how. When he did wrong, he knew it wasn't Mama's sentiments. I thank You that You have not left us alone but you have given us his three girls and their husbands and children to love. I ask You now to accept him back to Your Bosom the way I accepted him to mine when You sent him to me. I am grateful. Guard my heart from bitterness til that day I join him there with You in Your Kingdom. Amen'
Then she said, very quietly and matter of factly, "we can go now."
My face was scalded by tears and burned by the blustering winds like those that had taken down Daddy's single engine airplane just days before. My sister, who was better than 7 months pregnant with her first child wept softly beside me. My husband, struggled to keep up a brave front but at some point emotion began getting to him, also.
The ride back to the house she'd shared with my Grandpa since Daddy was just over a year old was long and quiet. When we arrived back there we were met with questions about where we'd been. I wasn't able to answer. Grandma was. "We went back out to the cemetery," she said, with the kind of   clear strong voice I couldn't find. "There were some things that needed done out there."
And that was that. She needed to fix her son's final resting place the way she'd fixed things for him his whole life. And she needed to talk to her Father about her feelings on the matter.
I was incredulous then, as I am now, to her words and deeds that day.
I had one other thought. I have it still. My sisters and I have a lot to live up to.