Let’s take Grandma. I was lucky to become intensely aware of her mortality ten months before her stroke in 2010. In January, the night I was to take her to the symphony, my uncle took her to the hospital with a bad cough. She was in the ICU for a week with pneumonia. When I saw the tracheal tube and the oxygen in her nose, heard the beeping monitor and her loopy comments, and felt how thin she was in the hospital gown, I knew from here on out, I had to appreciate every moment I had with her.
And I did. Nearly every week from February to November, I drove to the hospital or the nursing home or her house to see her. Sometimes all I could do was try to feed her pie to help her gain a pound or two. Other times I got to take her for a walk or play the piano for her. And tucked into those months like treasures were a few long, slow conversations about life and love and music. Even when she was sarcastic and moody, I just knew I was in the right place, to be there with her, to be connected to a woman of such wit, grace, and acceptance. I am thankful her mortality made her more dear to me.
This Lent, there is a different ending I find weighing on my heart—my time left here. I am excited to be married in September, but wish I wouldn’t have to move so far. Recently I found out that to be eligible for competitive status in applying for other government jobs, John has to stay three years in Cherokee, North Carolina—not, as we originally thought, only one year. With every new revelation about this job, I feel my heart sink. I have known since December that I would likely be leaving, but part of me hoped something would change, or that we could come back after a short time. I fear the unknown of my vocation in a tiny tourist town in the mountains. I fear loneliness in a new place. I fear change.
But this impending kind of death reminds me to look around at the goodness of the community where I am now. I moved to the West Hyattsville House on the eve of the new year 2010, pretty broken. All fall I’d been living at home with my parents and commuting three hours per day. John was in Palestine. I’d been trying to connect with childhood friends and finding we’d changed. I had no rhythm in my spiritual life. I’d already been lonely for a year in Tanzania and I ached for my college friends.
That first night at the Hyattsville House, Amy threw a party. People from the New Leaf community came, and we played games, and I remember thinking at the end of the night, I haven’t laughed so genuinely in months. I remember thinking, Wow, it is nice to be around people who get what I’m about. Talking to Amy a few months later, I said something like, “I really value having friends who are different than me, to challenge me in my thinking and widen my views.”
“I do too,” she said, “but I also like having friends who are the same. The same is nice too.”
I too often focus on what can be improved, in myself and in the world around me. People in the workplace have told me it’s a gift, but sometimes it makes me miss out. It’s like I don’t really believe that I am mortal, or that there is more than this life, so I insist on striving to perfect it. There have been many times I’ve complained about New Leaf, to myself, or aloud. I wish it were more age-diverse, I wish everything didn’t have to be so complicated, I wish blah blah blah. We can always find something wrong with where we are, with who we are. But New Leaf community gave me back a piece of myself, and I have always been thankful for that.
A few months after I joined New Leaf, writing group was formed. At the risk of sounding like a bad country/pop song, I thought this was what I had been waiting for my whole life. Here we had my #1 favorite thing in the world—getting to know deep down what people are really about, and sharing what I’m really about. AND here we had that happening, but gently, so that I could take the time to craft and even hide behind my words, so that I could avoid all the usual awkwardness of the beginning of friendships—trying to express myself aloud and tripping on my words, timing my comments right, knowing when to share something vulnerable or when it’s too soon. Writing group has been a place for me to be me.
This small example of abundant life and loss brings me back to the larger sense of my mortality. This Lent, I find a reminder to be thankful for the gifts I have been given. I also begin to think like this—if God has blessed me so richly in this time, and in this life, then even where there is death there must be more. There must be resurrection. I hate to admit it, but I think I’ll probably come to love Cherokee.
