Giselle

Giselle McComb

Today was the memorial service at Trinity for my daughter's roommate, Giselle. Giselle died in a car accident on December 28, two days after her twenty-second birthday. Elise spoke at the memorial service.

It's hard for a parent to see their children go through such difficult times. Elise really misses her friend and is having a difficult time coming to terms with the reality that Giselle is now in heaven.

But I am also so proud of the way Elise is handling things - if the word "proud" is an accurate word to use in this situation. Heaven is now more real than ever to Elise. When things get hard, she stops and thinks about what Giselle must be doing in heaven and how wonderful it must be to be in the presence of God.

These are the closing paragraphs of what Elise wrote and read at the memorial service today:

The loss of a best friend is unbearable and unbelievably difficult. Often, I just feel like I will see her again soon. Or like I could just pick up the phone and catch up on what we did over the holidays. Like I said before, Giselle was always busy so it’s easy to just think that she’s off babysitting or in the library studying.

But she is gone. And while I mourn for Giselle, she has left me with a gift. Because of the way Giselle lived her life, because of her relationship with God, she has given ALL of us a gift. And that gift is that we can know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, where Giselle is right now. Like the song that was played at her funeral, I can only imagine!!!

Psalm 23:6 states, “Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” Giselle declared her faith as ‘not having a religion, but a relationship with the Lord.' She made this very clear with all of the decisions that she made in her life. There is not a day that I don’t think about Giselle, but there is a humbling that comes with the mourning of her passing to know exactly where she is and Who she is with. I will miss her smile and her kind words. I look forward to seeing her again on that day when we'll all be united, spending forever together in His glorious presence!

Elise also shared about the way it baffled her that Giselle LOVED winter! Being Southern born and bred, my daughter could not fathom why anyone in their right mind would like the cold weather. But Giselle did! And I think the picture of her on a cold day captures her love of winter. Doesn't she radiate loveliness?

At the end of his beloved "Narnia Tales", C. S. Lewis describes the events that transpire as the characters in his story enter Heaven: "The things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

Enjoy the real story, Giselle!