Just before I left for India, my last remaining grandparent passed away--my paternal grandmother. I was in Michigan, which meant a quick trip home for her visitation and back here in time to catch my flight. I came back from India just in time to start classes again, so there's been little time to think, not to mention grieve.
Grieving on your own like this is an odd sort of thing, though. There comes a point when all of the lovely and well-intentioned "I'm sorry"s just aren't enough, and you wish for a different sort of empathy that can only come from shared experience. It's the silent waves of never-agains, the I-wishes, the should-haves, the remember-whens, and the flash-photographed memories that make this hard.
I purposely didn't allow myself to do any of that in India, because I wanted to take in as much as possible without connecting it to that grieving process. That it worked, I'm glad.
But now, I'm one week in to another semester at seminary and still haven't made the time to do any of that processing. My family has a massive head start, which means that they've already made it to the fighting-over-possessions stage. Meanwhile, I'm 300 miles away and still back at "wait, what?"
And so I try to envision, once again, at what the new normal will look like after so much turnover. New pieces keep getting added to an ever-changing puzzle picture, and I sit here praying "Lord, what's next?"
And instead of "go," I hear "sit, and stay a while."
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