She is all I write about, in one way or another

I never met my grandfather, but I grieved him

all my life. Generations recollect his sacrifice,

his arrest and persecution as pastor and priest

of the house, saving souls and printing Bibles,

murdered for his preaching of the Gospel.

But fewer know the woman who washed his feet

by night. Hungrily and wearily carrying eight

children while cleaning offices at dawn

 – farming, cooking, milking –

all the more and all alone when widowed.

This saint of a woman who, when offered money,

could never spare it on herself. On visits to her

small apartment, she would shuffle over and

gift me jars of fermented cabbage, homemade berry jams,

and dried pasta, along with flowers she had picked in gardens

to take home with me. She would clasp wrinkled fingers ‘round my own,

eyes imploring, what more can I do for you,

and laugh and tell me stories

of her husband.

She left behind an envelope of bills,

painstakingly collected over years to pay for her own funeral,

and one last card for her granddaughter’s birthday four months from now.

She left behind, in her fridge, four last jars of homemade jam

for four local children and I wonder if I will taste

the anointing in the raspberries.

She left behind one final prayer

for her children to walk in truth that night

before she died, with the son who, in her eyes, encountered Jesus,

and in whose eyes, I then met Jesus too

through this inheritance of Hope –

Nadezhda.

An elegy for my beloved grandmother and woman of God: Nadezhda Soloveevna Abramchuk, April 2 1942 - March 27 2022.

Her name, “Nadezdha,” is “Hope” in Ukrainian and Russian.