I’ve always considered myself blessed to have parents who love Jesus and who raised us to know Him. Of course, one is not born a Christian – it is a choice a person makes when they are old enough to understand the truth. But to be taught the truth from childhood is a blessing, and to have a family legacy of faith is a blessing indeed.

Not everyone in my family believes as I do, but among those who do are my parents, and at least some of my grandparents, and perhaps my great-grandparents, though I did not know them. My mom’s mom was the grandparent I knew best. She lived with us for a time and used to babysit me when I was too young to stay alone. She taught me how to play pinochle and bake pie from scratch and every Christmas I would watch her and my mom make the best fruit cake (as far as fruit cake goes) and to-die-for chocolate 8-layer cake, which was really more like a torte. The layers were so thin they barely covered the cake pans. And the frosting was made from Cadbury chocolate bars.

In the summer, when my mom worked, I spent time with Grandma. In the mornings we worked on baking projects. Then she’d watch her one favorite soap opera, and when it ended, she would get out her box of pictures and tell me about her past.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I love history and historical fiction. Grandma would take a picture, and I would ask about the people. She would regale me with stories of her youth and her young married life, and in some cases I could still detect the emotion that went with the memory.

Grandma was the ninth out of ten children, though she never knew her four oldest siblings as they died, probably of some epidemic, before she was born. She did have four sisters that lived, two of whom she remained close to until her death.

She grew up in Detroit and lived to see Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. I have a picture somewhere of Detroit when the main roads were dirt and people could plant gardens and raise chickens. It was Grandma’s job to pluck her family’s chickens to ready them for cooking. As an adult, she didn’t like eating chicken all that much. She even doctored her chicken noodle soup with ketchup!

Grandma loved words, a legacy she passed on to me. She could play a mean game of Scrabble. I still have her original set, and on those rare occasions when we pull it out to play, I think of her.

There was a time in her life when things didn’t go so well for my grandma. I came along later in her life so I only knew Grandpa through vague images of memory and whatever Grandma told me. He died when I was three, leaving her a widow in her early sixties. But she was a strong woman and always rose to a task. She loved to cook, and she loved to give. If she hadn’t used something in a year, she gave it to someone who could.

Grandma went faithfully to church every Sunday, but it occurred to me one day that I had never asked her about her faith. I knew people often attended church without knowing Jesus, and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t ask Grandma what she believed. So one day I stopped by her apartment and asked. She’d been ill, and when I asked her about her faith in Jesus, she told me that when she suffered physical pain she could only imagine how much worse it must have been for her Savior when he died on the cross for her. The thought made her heart break in gratitude.

She died a few years later of cancer. My mom spent those last hours with Grandma, and she told me that right before Grandma took her last breath she spoke. She did not speak to my mom. Perhaps she was too miserable to notice anyone else in the room with her. Or perhaps her gaze was already focused on the next life waiting beyond, because she passed into eternity with one final word on her lips. A name that is above every name.

Jesus…As though He were waiting there to take her home, she said His name and breathed her last.

When my time comes, I want to leave such a legacy.