Greg Asimakoupoulos

    On a visit to Connecticut, I drove to Bridgeport in search of the cemetery where both P. T. Barnum and Fanny Crosby (writer of more than 3,000 hymns including Blessed Assurance and To God Be The Glory) are buried. I remembered that Fanny was blinded as an infant when a doctor accidently put poison in her eyes instead of eye drops. She lived to be one month shy of 95.
For a hymnal collector and hymn historian, this was a pilgrimmage I have anticipated for years. When I arrived I discovered that Barnum's pride, Tom Thumb, is also buried there. All three are within 50 yards of each other. It is such a commentary on our culture that the Circus King has an enormous headstone 20 feet in the air (as does Tom Thumb... actually at the top of an obelisk is a full size statue of him.... all 3 feet) and Fanny's grave is simple, small, and almost unrecognizable. Her headstone reads: Aunt Fanny. She hath done what she could. Here is what flowed from my pen when I got home and reflected on what I had witnessed.
 
Blessed Assurance

The Circus King’s
     imposing resting place
overshadows a humble grave
overlooked by most
that boasts a testimony of grace.
Here lies Aunt Fanny.
She did what she could.
And would it surprise you
if I told you that what she could
redefined the word?
Though blinded as a baby
by a doctor’s grave mistake,
she was not sightless
to the matchless truth of faith.
With pen in hand
she raised our level of understanding
of a God we cannot see
while giving us
     a vocabulary of praise.
Refusing to be bitter
for her plight of endless night,
Miss Fanny Jane accepted her cross
as a privilege of sharing
in the sufferings of Christ.
For her, faith continued to be
the assurance of things hoped for
and the evidence of things unseen.
And the hymns she penned,
in her 95 years of living,
bore witness to the blest assurance
birthed in those
     who wholly trust the Lord.
                fine