Have you ever heard someone say something completely simple, but yet you tingled all over?

One of the most profound statements I ever heard spoken, came from my dying grandmother. Barbara Ellen Swim Brown was the youngest of nine, and married my grandfather, one of 15, so I imagine she had heard a great many things in the course of her life. She knew poverty, wallowed in riches, but always said having little was more than having much.

In 2010 she was diagnosed with cancer, it was aggressively everywhere. We spend hours and days traveling and sitting on hard chairs while she went through treatments, and yet, even when she grew ill, her skin burned by all the so called helpful medicines, she never passed up a chance to stop by her favorite restaurant.

She was given 6 months or less. So of course she did what any mountain momma would do, she stopped her medications and began giving everything away. Crazy, I thought at the time, and yet, now I understand a little better. She lived in a big beautiful home, owned a business worth more than most of us will ever see in a whole lifetime, and yet, in the end of her life, she sold her singlewide trailer, and moved into a nursing home after a brief stay with her daughter. She hated to be a burden and we hated she felt like one. I actually went back to school to renew my CNA licensing, so she was never alone there. But surprisingly she flourished for a time. Making friends, taking classes, and attending church more regularly since visiting churches always came by.

Each Sunday we took the kids to visit her after church. Three and half years after her final diagnosis, my grandmother looked up to me and said,’ “I’m ready now. Though I would love to see Sammi’s baby first, but I know it will be beautiful like her.” I was dumbfounded at the statement, and being my granny, she knew and added, “Oh dear don’t you worry for me,” she coddled. “I will just march right up to that pearly gate and say, ” she smacked a fist into her palm. “Lord, here I am. I gave it all I had, and there ain’t nothing left. It will have to do.”

She died three days later.

Those words have never left me, when I still struggle to remember if I ate breakfast or paid that most recent water bill. My grandmother taught me to make jelly and cornpone. She said to never drink tap water when you got a spring out back. That fish was cooked two ways, done and burnt. She said to never let hate eat your guts and innards, because no one will care but your sore guts. She spouted that one should always drive through old roads and remember. That sewing your own stuff last longer, and that God knows a man’s heart even if we think him a fool.

She gave and gave and gave until it made folks worry over her sanity, and yet, she was smarter than the rest of us. You can’t take it with you, she would say. It doesn’t matter if it’s material things or simply teaching those around you something society has deemed old school. Don’t spend your life collecting things, obtaining knowledge only to keep it to yourself. Teach, share, and give what you can to those around you. So one day if you are blessed to stand at that pearly gate, you can lift your arms up just as she did and say, “Lord, I gave it all, and this is all that is left.”