a [re]focused life

So, it’s Thanksgiving week.
Today, I am going to talk about my family. We’re a rugged, ragged crew, but… I love us. We’ve had heartaches and blessings, pain and joy, and while we don’t look or function how I would have imagined, this family of mine is a patchwork quilt, sewn and held together by common bonds of love and grace. It’s interesting how we often look for strangers to love, to shower grace upon, when sometimes the greatest needs are right within our own family. Forgiveness is tough. And extending new mercies, in the same way that God does with us, is a chore that I daresay is IMPOSSIBLE without the help of the Holy Spirit. But the end result is nothing short of beautiful, and “just as it should be,” in the way that it takes a pile of brokenness and turns it into redemption.
It took the funeral of my paternal grandfather, earlier this month, to get my dad, sister, brother, and myself all in the same room for the first time in a year. And not because we have any ill will toward each other, but simply because of time and distance and money and all of those things that become barriers as the days and years tick away. A few months ago, as my roommate was embarking an another trip home to Pennsylvania, I was a little bit shocked at the frequency of her trips. She was fortunate in that her parents were flying her home this time, but she regularly makes the drive 4 or more times a year. Meanwhile, I had no idea when I would see my family next, but it definitely wasn’t going to be in this calendar year, and thanks to some recent job uncertainty, probably not in the next calendar year, either. I was thinking 2013 was going to be my next chance to really “get home,” and in this case, “home” = Utah, because it’s where most of my immediate family lives.
I had become a little (or a lot) hardened to this fact. And maybe even a little bit boastful, in a weird way. My roommate was so thankful to get home to her family again, and I was proud in the fact that I didn’t know when I would see my family again, and that was just fine with me, thankyouverymuch. Because that is how I’ve coped with it all of these years. That is how I have made it work. They are there, and I am here (wherever here is, at any given time) and that is just The Way It Is. We can all be tough and muddle through and see each other every 12 to 18 months and just be okay with that. It’s worked quite well for me up until this point.
Until…
Until an awkward side hug with my dad during Taps. Until all of our tears fell and mixed together, watering the ground beneath our feet, the place where the shell of my grandfather now resides. It’s always weird to watch a dad cry. Uncomfortable and wrong and vulnerable and… a whole bunch of words that I don’t have command of, not then and not now. And I thought a lot about my grandpa and my dad, about the two of them, and their relationship, and what it was, and what it wasn’t. I think the saddest goodbyes are the ones where you don’t mourn so much what was, but what was not, and what never will be.
In the days and weeks since, I have done a lot of examining of my own heart and my own life, and all of these relationships with these people that I love. It truly is easy to keep all of them at arm’s (and 1,630 miles) length when I never see them. Ah, but it’s the gathering together again that makes it tough. When we are all in the same room, laughing and crying and breathing the same air. These people that I shared a roof with for 14-18 years of my life. Family. The people who just… get you, and not because they have grown to know you, but because they grew with you. Because they are you. Because they have the same smile, and the same twisted sense of humor. It is in that togetherness that I realize once again, in a heartwarming and heartbreaking way, just how much I miss them.
If nothing else, it is good to be reminded. It’s good to drink in that sweetness that–even amongst years of bitterness–can only be shared with those few people. It’s good to let love wash over all the other junk of this life, and to look at these people with a renewed and refreshed sense of wonder. A new and overwhelming sense of gratitude.
As my grandfather’s life was recounted, most of the tales involved ways in which he almost died, many times over. His crazy antics in a tiny prop plane. His time spent in an oil tanker during WWII. All of his many flirtations with danger. His love of all of the bad food and drink life has to offer. And yet, he spent 91 years on this earth. So many close calls, so many instances that could have ended his life early, but instead, he married, had two sons and five grandchildren, and an undetermined number of future great-grandchildren and beyond.
Sometimes we forget the power of one life . Without him, there would be no us. And without us, there would be no… future wisecracking, mugwump, hippity-hop, smartypants, know-it-all sonofaguns.
I love us. I really do.