Alfred Eugene Ellison

You had a wonderful essence of warmth and humor. Your smile brightened the room.
God bless you. May your essence live through those that you have touched in your family, friends and deacon ministry.

Love,

Wednesday Taylor

~Love is a deed. It is something we DO. Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. We trip, stumble, and sometimes fall, but God the Father catches us all. The promise of Christ is to absolve our sins, so through His death, we might live again. On the other side, suffering and pain are no more…. Faith is the key to the everlasting door. ~ Ralph Taylor

We are all suffering grief at the loss of Alfred Ellison, our Poopie. I remember the first time I saw him lying in his cradle--asleep. He was asleep the second time, and the third, prompting my nearly six-year-old mind to assume he was pooped. “Every time I come to see him, he is ‘sleep,” I said to our mother. “He is a little Poopie!” Fortunately, or unfortunately, the name stuck. He was my little brother, and I took my job seriously. If he were here, he would tell you that I always looked out for him. But he is not here, hence my grief. Grief is love with nowhere to go….
I am mostly numbed by his death, but aware of the well of tearful grief behind my final acceptance of the fact that Alfred is gone. Why is death so hard to accept? I think it is because eternal life was human destiny before the serpent beguiled our first parents. Normalized death still doesn’t feel normal. My trust is in a gracious and merciful God, who from the first day of man’s fall, began a work to restore our destiny to live with Him. Our eyes will close in that deep and dreamless sleep of death, but our eyes will one day open in the newness of life and first face we see will be Jesus. I trust that Poopie will be there, and I will see my brother again.