I ponder this life I have been invited to live. I did not detail all of these little joys when I dreamed of it as a young girl, but I enjoy them so, and I feel honored to be here. I sit in my rocker in the evening, light a candle and sip wine while reading books, and I enjoy it. I play chess with my children on the front porch while scooping leaves out of the baby's mouth, and watch him stand on shaky legs and pound two blocks together and delight in his little world, and I enjoy it. I feel my husband's warm hand on my back as he squeezes my shoulder to let me know he's there, and he loves me, and I feel safe, and I enjoy it. There are so many of these small moments that I enjoy so deeply, knowing that this is the salt of life - all these tiny seconds of enjoyment sprinkled in, almost hidden, folded between the bigger things that demand my attention like chores and long car rides and financial decisions.
And sometimes I fear the change that life brings. The change you can't avoid. For those of us who are blessed enough to have two parents who love us, we are all aware from childhood that someday we will have to live without them. It is inevitable, an awareness that doesn't pain us while we are young because it is a fact of life, the same sort of fact as we need food and water to survive and sometimes we fall and scrape our knees. But as age creeps up on me the reality of this fact is starker, more palpable. I take a moment to imagine the day when I will say goodbye to my mom and my dad, and my heart is tugged on, an ache creeps to my throat and I can almost feel my grief and sense of feeling lost in a world without the people who raised me - and I think, how will I survive? How will I manage being elderly and weak and lonely without my parents there to guide me? When my dad had covid last winter, and his oxygen was a little lower than what is normal, and I had just seen a friend lose her dad to the disease, all I could think was, "I'm am not ready for you to stop being my dad, I'm not ready for you to stop being my dad." The strangest phrase, but there it was, in my heartache and shock. (He made a full recovery, thankfully.)
I watched my mom lose her mother, and I'm not sure how she survived and managed to care for four children. Her world was turned upside down. Like a beautifully-laid table with Thanksgiving dinner atop an elegant table cloth, and then the whole thing just wham, flipped over, the entire table, all of it, and then she had to pick up the pieces and see what could be salvaged. That's all grief, I suppose.
Grief. It is the single most terrifying thing to me.
The sweet mama I follow who just lost a baby. My friend from Washington who lost her husband and her father in just over a year. You must make do without the original feast you thought you were sitting down to, the sense of home and comfort, you no longer live a life in the bliss of ignorance, not knowing what grief tastes like. I pray daily that God will not take my loved ones from me, but I almost feel egotistical asking this, assuming I can somehow cheat the greatest fact in life which is that we all must die, at some point or another, some earlier than others, all in different circumstances. I would apologize for being maudlin, but I believe it's too late for that. It was probably too late by the time I was four and wrote a song about how I never got to meet my great-grandmother because she died when I was a baby.
Anyhow.
I am very much interested in the topics of suffering as worship, finding beauty in a broken world, and trusting God with an unknown and sometimes scary future. I recently purchased the book This Beautiful Truth by Sarah Clarkson. This idea that things that hurt aren't hopeless or meaningless is very comforting for me, as someone who deals with invasive thoughts like these.
Those are my thoughts as I sit here in this house my husband and I might buy, our very own house. As my healthy children sleep peacefully in bed above me. As I hear the crackle of the candle beside me and before I turn back to my ghost story that has me in all the right vibes for fall. I love this life, and I hope I have the strength and grace to handle it ten, twenty, fifty years from now. Because that is right around the corner. All I can do is hold on to all this goodness, so tightly, breathe it in, full lungs, that beautiful scent. And be thankful. Thankful. Thankful.
