As I walked to the nursing home from grandma's room in assistant living, I felt like I was about to witness an execution. When I got there, that is exactly what I saw. To see my grandfather so thin, fragile, and frail, sitting in a wheel chair, looking so alone and empty... it was exactly like seeing an execution. A few tears managed to escape from the overwhelming flood that wanted to come out. To see a man who survived WWII, raised a family, preached, counseled, and made us all laugh just a few years before, has now had purpose stripped away from him. I know he lived for purpose, just as I do, and it kills me to see this way. I pray and ask God to take him away soon, out of my love for him. I just want him to be happy and in peace. He doesn't get that in the dark nursing home room that too much resembles a hospital with the lady down the hallway that screams at the top of her lungs. Her cry is the cry that many there feel. No hope, no peace.

As I am here in Mississippi this week, I brought a book to read. It's a fiction book about a girl with schizophrenia (from her perspective). Scizophrenia and Alzheimer's have some amazing similarities, and to witness these two lives and two experiences at once is overwhelming and eye-opening. Mental illness is one of those things that I don't understand... I mean, why would God allow that to happen? I suppose to make people, like me, who witness these tragedies to realize that I am not in control. I can lose my mind any day. My world can simply fall apart within a few weeks, days, hours, even minutes. But it's God that keeps me going. I hope that God is giving my granddad some comfort through our little visits. I hope that when he does pass, that he passes knowing that he is leaving behind a great legacy, and a family that loves him and wants to live full lives such as his. I hope that God gives him those two realizations as he passes from this life and into eternity.