A week ago Melissa and I rode with my younger brother Russ and his wife Alecia 3 hours north to attend my aunt Ginny’s funeral in Bremen, Indiana.<\/p>\n\n\n
Ginny was married to my mom’s brother, R.T., for 61 years. She was a quiet and kind woman of great accomplishment.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Ginny was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few months ago. The same cancer that took my mom’s life in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n
It struck me at the funeral that R.T. is now the age his father was when I was in college – and R.T. looks a lot like I remember Grandpa.<\/p>\n\n\n
I told Melissa at the end of the day that if I could have a choice, I would check out like my grandfather did. He was fit and healthy until the end. I remember that when he turned 80, his big birthday gift was a rowing machine.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
A few years later, he went to bed one night and didn’t rise in the morning.<\/p>\n\n\n
It makes me think of the fantastic title of Dave Barry’s exercise book parody from years ago: Stay Fit and Healthy Until You’re Dead<\/i>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
That’s one of my life goals now.<\/p>\n\n\n
Now, I have exercised on a regular basis for years, but I was recently diagnosed with a torn meniscus, putting my running to an end. The knee problems, along with recent cancer diagnoses of people I love, remind me that, at the end of the day, I don’t have an ounce of ultimate control over the state of my body.<\/p>\n\n\n
Or how the end will come.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Or when.<\/p>\n\n\n
There’s not much that is certain about the future. But at the funeral, Psalm 23 hit me deeper than ever before. Especially verse 6:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n
So far, the first half of that verse has proven to be reliable. To the uttermost.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Why wouldn’t I trust the second half?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A week ago Melissa and I rode with my younger brother Russ and his wife Alecia 3 hours north to attend my aunt Ginny’s funeral in Bremen, Indiana. Ginny was married to my mom’s brother, R.T., for 61 years. She was a quiet and kind woman of great accomplishment.\u00a0 Ginny was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9749"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9750,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9749\/revisions\/9750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}