Good days rarely feel remarkable when we are in the midst of them. Their goodness is often something we recognize only in hindsight, when loss sharpens memory and meaning. I learned this lesson on what became my sister’s last good day.
In the final week of her life, six days before she passed away, my sister Diana, known as De to everyone, had one such day that seemed unremarkable amidst her slow decline brought on by terminal cancer. Only later would I understand why that particular day, among all others, held a quiet goodness we didn’t fully recognize as it was unfolding.
What made the day good? You might think of the basics – the last day she managed to go through some semblance of normality; the last day she could hold up her end of a conversation, the last time she ate a meal, or the last day without morphine. And all these things would be true. But what made it good was more akin to the goodness of creation, even as the valley of the shadow of death was beginning to close in.
In Genesis 1, after each act of creation, God declares it tôv – it was good. When the work is complete, God sees that it is tôv meod – very good. This repeated affirmation reveals more than divine satisfaction; it marks creation’s correspondence with God’s own character: full of generative capacity for creating, sustaining, and extending life. The goodness in Genesis 1 also reflects God’s intentionality: creation functioning together as it was intended, bringing wholeness and flourishing.1 Throughout the Old Testament, tôv also describes what is morally right, what promotes the justice of shalom, and what leads to flourishing when trusting in God’s covenantal promises.2
Yet many of us grow up in places where this goodness is distant. The world God called good remains marred by the wounds of human brokenness, often beginning in the very homes where we should first experience the human manifestation of God’s love. My childhood in Chicago was such a place.
I often joke that my family “put the fun in dysfunction,” but that is just a mask. Our father was as charming as he was mercurial. My brother John, eighteen months younger than me, and I never knew which version of him would walk through the door at the end of the day. But our half-sister De, seven years older, knew all too well. As his stepdaughter, she became the target of most of his physical and emotional cruelty. But none of us, including our mother, was immune. To cope, my brother and I threw ourselves into church activities. De threw herself into partying and pot.
By the time our father died of alcohol poisoning, when I was twelve and De was nineteen, the damage to our family had already taken root. I bent toward perfectionism, an early strategy to curry our father’s favor, while De drifted between getting high and chasing distant dreams that could never come true.
As I went off to college, she moved around the Midwest and eventually settled in Madison, working low-wage jobs and forming transient friendships – a world unmoored from any stable sense of past, present, or future. She stayed in touch with our mother, who kept me informed about De’s life; contact I convinced myself was enough. Beneath that distance sat harder truths: my still simmering anger at our unfair childhoods and the quiet shame of knowing that De had been permanently wounded by burdens the rest of us barely escaped.
Yet years later, when she was diagnosed with cancer at fifty-two, it was me she called, reaching out to make things right between us. Reluctant obedience to my Christian faith and a measure of guilt put me on a plane to Madison to sit with her as she began chemotherapy. Over the next eight years, I would fly back whenever her health took a turn for the worse, each visit reopening old questions about grace, mercy, love, and what family owes to one another.
Eventually came the call I had long known was coming. After years of treatment, her body could no longer bear the cancer or the cure. Her doctor told me she had about a week left. Once again, I flew to Madison.
Four days later, my brother, who was also long estranged from De, drove down from central Wisconsin to spend the afternoon with us. They had not spoken in years, but when he walked into the room, De’s face lit up. There was no script for what came next, no plan to mend anything. We simply slipped into the kind of stories families tell when they are trying to remember who they once were.
With De mostly listening, John and I began recalling all the good moments we could still name: trips to Wrigley Field, long afternoons on the shores of Lake Michigan, our annual visit to the Christmas windows at Marshall Field’s Department Store, and those northern Wisconsin summer vacations with my aunt in a small town that seemed to become even smaller as we grew older. We talked about fishing, berry picking, the local supper club, and the shooting stars hidden from us the rest of the year by Chicago’s city lights.
The stories themselves were ordinary fragments of childhood. But as we spoke them aloud, something shifted. Even the memories tinged by sorrow felt lighter. De occasionally smiled, taking them in as if she were hearing about our childhood for the first time. And in a way, she was. So were we.
For the first time in decades, the three of us were not defined by what had broken us but by what we had somehow preserved. In those few hours, our remembering felt both familiar and entirely new; ordinary family storytelling that revealed an unexpected strength and a joy we had not known we carried.
Our memories, once isolated and shaped by fear and injustice, became shared stories. Spoken aloud together, they were no longer wounds but offerings. As theologian Philip Sheldrake writes, “Reconciliation involves healing memories, particularly those of belittlement, rejection, and denial. Part of a process of healing is to realize the incompleteness of any one story when it is isolated from the other stories.”3 Listening to our stories became the last act of my sister’s life before she slipped into a coma two days later. In her stillness, I saw that change does not always require great feats of courage but can unfold in the quiet work of naming what is good.
The goodness we glimpsed that afternoon was more than just sentiment. It felt like something long buried had finally been allowed to float to the surface. We hadn’t planned to heal anything; we hadn’t even set out to remember differently. Yet, as we spoke those stories aloud, something within them began to mend us. Our new narratives reflected not only our survival but also the seeds of resilience that had been planted alongside the roots of brokenness. Looking back, I see that what we experienced that day was, in no small way, a portion of God’s tôv breaking through.
In Genesis 1, when God calls light into being and declares it good, that light is not merely illumination; it is God’s first act of grace, pushing back on chaos. In John’s Gospel, that same light appears again in personal form: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” The light of creation and the light of redemption are one—the radiance of God’s steadfast goodness that begins creation is renewed through Jesus Christ.4
In Christ, redemption points us simultaneously back to God’s holistic intent at creation and forward to His culminating intent at the eschaton; to the day when, once again, all creation is made whole. It also anchors us in this present time. The light is not only a promise of what will be but an acknowledgment of the redemption of all brokenness, starting in the here and now.5
On De’s last good day, I experienced the light of creation and the light of redemption as one. In that quiet afternoon, Christ’s light pushed back on the old chaos of our childhood—not erasing it but reframing it through His gift of healing. By weaving a new story from the frayed threads of our childhood, we became, for the first time, a whole family.
And it was tôv meod.
Footnotes
- Tyler J. VanderWeele, A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing (University of Notre Dame Press, 2024), 11-12.
- See, for example, Psalm 34:8; Proverbs 11:23; Isaiah 52:7; Jeremiah 29:10–11; Amos 5:14
- Philip Sheldrake, “A Spirituality of Reconciliation: Encouragement for Anglicans from a Roman Catholic Perspective.” Journal of Anglican Studies 6, no. 1 (2008): 112.
- James Montgomery Boice, The Gospel of John: Volume 1, The Coming of the Light (Baker Books,1999), 49.
- George R. Beasley-Murray, Bruce M Metzger, David Allen Hubbard, Glenn W Barker, John D. W Watts, James W. Watts, Ralph P. Martin, and Lynn Allan Losie. John, Volume 36: Revised Edition (Zondervan Academic, 2018), 11.
Wonderful piece and very well written!