Shout-Out to Sister E.

You know what it’s like to clean your house or mow your lawn and suddenly have a flash from your past, right? What it’s like to sit down, catch your breath, and think about something that happened to you and someone close to you, right?

Well, I just had one of those moments. I started thinking about the time that my husband’s grandmother died on a Friday of a Memorial Day weekend. Then, on that same Friday, a transformer blew on a neighborhood power line and it killed our refrigerator. So, we were out a refrigerator on Friday of Memorial Day weekend and my husband had a funeral to help plan. Also, my husband had a work trip that he had to leave to attend at the tail end of his grandmother’s funeral.

Surely, you think, my husband could have pushed back or skipped the work trip, right? Well, no. No, he couldn’t. You see, my husband and his mother (the dead grandmother’s daughter) were faculty members at the same Catholic high school, and they were both supposed to be chaperones on the same overnight Catholic high school faith retreat. This Catholic school would already be down one chaperone because my mother-in-law was not going to cut out of her mother’s funeral early for this. Also, my husband was going to be the only male chaperone. So, he actually did have to cut out of the funeral early for this Catholic school trip.

So, anyway, on Friday of that Memorial Day weekend, my husband and I threw all of our refrigerator food into several coolers and then ran to Sheetz to buy ice for said coolers. We had to borrow coolers from our in-laws, and we had to turn down the “free food” that people were making for us in our bereavement.

The true hero in this story is my sister E. You see, my husband was responsible for providing cold beverages (Pepsi, Coke, and Root Beer, you guys, not booze) for the Mercy Meal that was planned immediately after grandmother-in-law’s funeral. (The Mercy Meal is the Catholic name for the lunch that people have after a funeral. This one was held in the church social hall. My husband’s family purchased prepared food for this, but the beverages weren’t provided in the purchase.)

However, my husband also had to leave the funeral early for that Catholic school trip that I mentioned. So, he couldn’t even attend his grandmother’s Mercy Meal. So, my sister E. helped me to get all of the cold beverages to the Mercy Meal to feed a bunch of people. Then, after the Mercy Meal, E. helped me to scoop up all of the ice that hadn’t melted that had been used to keep the cold beverages cold, and she helped me to haul it all back to my house so that I could dump it into the coolers that held my refrigerator food.

Thank the Lord that I have you as a sister, E!