The fourth essential prayer

I was nine when my parents got divorced and my brother and I moved to Virginia from California with our mom. We lived with my maternal grandparents in their one-bedroom apartment in Falls Church for a year. My mom and brother slept on the sofa bed while I slept on a Korean yeol that we folded during the day. It was a hard time. We were poor, we were marked with the "shame" of divorce (at least during that time in the Korean American church community), and my parents never really told us anything so we never knew for sure what the hell was going on.

My grandparents, whom I'd never really grown up with (we were the only grandkids that lived out on the west coast while all of their other children and grandchildren lived in Northern Virginia), didn't know quite what to do with two young kids. My grandfather was stoic, stern, loving and kind-hearted. My grandmother was hilarious and the definition of loving. I never knew her when she was younger, so to me she was always the grandma who walked around without a bra and had boobs that literally stretched down to her navel from breastfeeding five children (and not wearing a bra). She was the grandma who always snuck us $10 and $20 bills when my grandfather wasn't looking. She was the grandma who would go pick weeds in the park behind the apartment building to make Korean sook-dduk - so embarrassing, but so delicious. She called every single one of her 13 grandchildren her "puppy" (gangaji) in Korean and if she ever needed to actually call us by name, she would say the wrong name the first couple tries before she got your name right. One of the funniest memories I have of her was a lunch we were having at one of her favorite restaurants, a Peking duck place in Falls Church. She stood up to go to the bathroom, took a couple steps and was was standing between our table and the neighboring one when her pants fell right down. She didn't even flinch, just pulled her pants up, smiled at us and explained matter of factly that she unbuttoned her pants because she was full, and that's just what old people did.

After my grandfather passed away from prostate cancer/chemo when I was in college - about 18 years ago - every time I visited Virginia, she would tell me: "my puppy, this is the last time you're going to see me because I want to go join your grandfather in heaven." Literally. She would say this to me year after year. Not morbidly, just matter of factly. But my grandma is a fighter. And while she's had Parkinson's and dementia for years now, she has clung on to life.

Earlier today, my cousin messaged me to let me know that our grandma has not woken up for 2 days and was being admitted to the ER for potential pneumonia and sepsis. She's currently on antibiotics and an IV and is doing better, but we'll need to wait to see whether she will pull through. She's 95 years old and has defied so many odds.

At times like this, I don't even know what to pray. Do I pray that God will help her pull through? Do I pray that God will grant the wish she used to tell me year after year, to join my grandfather in heaven? 

Two authors I admire - Glennon Doyle Melton and Anne Lamott - have noted that there are three essential prayers. Glennon names them "please, thank you and WTF." Anne names them "help, thanks, wow." But I think there's a fourth, and in the last couple years - through my separation with my husband, our reconciliation, our miscarriage - the prayer that I've prayed more than any other is acceptance. I think that's different from the "please/help" prayer, because my "please" prayers are usually focused on asking God for what I want. The acceptance prayer is focused on asking God to help me accept whatever happens. It's not a request for God to change the external world, but to change the internal - my own heart. I pray for what I want, but I also pray that if I don't get it, that God will help me accept whatever happens without bitterness - i.e, that he will give me the grace to get through it. 

So I pray for my grandmother's health - that she will pull through and regain consciousness. I pray that if God does decide it's her time, that he will take her kindly and without pain, and that whatever exists in the afterlife, God will take her in his care. But mostly, I pray for all her children and grandchildren, that God would comfort us and give us the grace to accept whatever happens.