Ruth Johnston Perkins died between Ascension and Pentecost. A week and a half later—just after Trinity Sunday—her great-granddaughter, Ruth Chapman Perkins, was born. Grandma Ruth exited the world with great physical suffering, and eleven days later my wife brought our daughter into the world, through forty hours of agonizingly painful labor. The blood of Grandma Ruth runs in little Ruth’s veins. In time Ruthie will know the stories of her forebears—the legacy of her grandparents’ faith and faithfulness, their strength of character and industriousness. We pray she will carry that legacy on, a proud and faithful bearer of her family history.

Because of the manner of her death—with her indefatigable spirit intact through the last—you might say that Grandma conquered death. She was not overcome by fear of the unknown, despite physical agony, she was never brought to despair. David Mills wrote that his father’s death taught him “that to die with dignity means to accept what God has given you and deal with it till the end…It means actually to live as if the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away, and in either case blessed be the name of the Lord.” Certainly, my grandmother did that, and thus, in a manner of speaking, she did triumph over death. Her spirit lives on, too, through the name and life of our daughter. In facing the death of his father, director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon said he “was quite comforted by the idea that when people die, by talking about them and celebrating them, you keep them alive.” As we celebrate the life of our little Ruth, we will also be celebrating the life of her great-grandmother. In this manner we do—and we will—“keep Grandma alive.”

Read the article “A Grandmother’s Life, Death and Resurrection” on theimaginativeconservative.org.