My Scottish Grandpa could spin a yarn. The older he got, the more likely he was to say to us. "let me tell you one more..."
I often wish I'd written his stories down. That may be one of the reasons I continue with this blog, to preserve family stories and history. A lot his interesting tales, I just don't remember well.
There is one, though, that I have never forgotten.
Actually, he told the story but it was my grandmother who retold it to me.
At the time of the telling, he was well into his eighties and suffering with the cancer that would soon take his life. His only child, my father, had been killed in a plane crash just months earlier. To say that Papa was devastated would be a gross understatement.
He was sitting in their den in what was his favorite chair. He had quiet for so long that Grandma surmised he was asleep. When he began to speak, she at first thought he was talking in his sleep.
He was saying the same thing, over and over again, at first.
"Right by the hand," he said, as if rehearsing the line.
Grandma asked him what he meant. As his health fell it would be reasonable to think his mind might, also. Eventually, it did. But not that day.
That day he lifted his head, locked eyes with her, but spoke as though he was able to see forward and back at the same time. Grandma would later describe it as remarkably odd and terribly sweet at the same time.
"Who are you talking about, Charles," she asked him, to clarify what she really already knew.
He sat up straighter then as he said the name that meant so much to him then, especially then following such great loss and facing his own death. "Jesus," he said.
"He has led us. All the way. Right by the hand. The whole time. The whole way. Can't you see? It was Jesus."
He grew quiet again.
Whether he was reflecting or sleeping she did not know; she could not say. But she could say, and did say, that a comfort washed over them both that they never quite got over.
That perspective carried him through to the end and sustained her in the years between his death and her own.
I recall those words and their imperative on days when my own life doesn't seem to make sense or I am overwhelmed.
Right by the hand, I know He's leading me, too. Just the way He did my grandparents. All the way. right by the hand.
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