Until we meet again

Today we remembered my Grandma Kirkpatrick and celebrated her life. She passed away peacefully on January 1, 2009 and left this life with her husband at her side and all of her children surrounding her bed. She was a loving Grandmother to me and I will miss her dearly. I have so many wonderful memories of my Grandma K, of her visits to our home in Riverside when I was a child, of holidays together and of the time I spent with her when I lived in San Diego the summer after my high school graduation.

When I think of my Grandma K I think of:

Chocolate, Root beer & Grape flavored licorice from Tom's Farms
Cookies in the cookie jar
My favorite Christmas presents
Seeing her in the audience at my Dance competitions
Her locket
Going to lunch at Islands
The summer of 1997
Pie for dessert
Big Bear Lake
Flowers on the patio
Candles burning
The gospel in my life
Family
Love

I feel eternally indebted to my Grandma for the gift of the gospel in my life. She invited the missionaries into her home when my mother was just a little girl and they were all baptized and sealed in the Los Angeles temple. Although her church activity lasted only a few years, she supported my mother in her decision to continue attending seminary and eventually to marry my father in the LA temple and raise my siblings and I in the church. During the time we spent together in 1997 she bore her simple testimony to me, that she "still believed". Oh how I loved my Grandma K... she will be missed.

On a lighter note, Julia was so curious about Grandma and as much as I tried to persuade her not to see Grandma up close, she insisted on going up to see her over and over. She had a lot of questions. It made us all smile :)
Things like:
Where are her legs? (under the bottom part of the casket, no biggie to us, but she must have thought they were missing.. ha ha)
Why is her bed so little?
Is she going to sleep in that "box" a long time?
Is she going to sleep at the church now?
After explaining that her special bed was going to go way down in the ground and her body would sleep there but her spirit was still alive and living with Heavenly Father she said "Like Magic?"
It is always refreshing to see the death of a loved one from a child's perspective, so full of faith and hope.