God’s Surprising Comfort During Grief

A few years ago, my mother-in-law collapsed on a Sunday morning and died. Her children and grandchildren rushed back to their hometown, and we spent the days between her death and the funeral grieving together in the family home. Because of the suddenness of her passing, we all longed for one last word from her. A day or two after her death, my sisters-in-law opened their mother’s jewelry box and found a stack of letters addressed to each child and to my father-in-law. They’d been written a decade before, as she had prepared for a major surgery. In them, she poured out her love and pride to each person in messages that were very personal. It wasn’t how we had planned it, but God gave us that final message from a beloved mother in the most unexpected of ways. —Amber J., Chicago, Illinois

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