I spent yesterday sitting beside a pool, listening to my friend process her mother’s impending death, and watching our kids laugh and play. It seems a lot of my days hold these tensions: threads of pain and sorrow inseparably woven through scenes of joy.
I no longer live in the depths of grief that held me in the years following Greg’s death, yet grief is still ever-present, whether it’s my own or someone else’s. It’s inescapable, really. We cannot numb, protect, or entertain ourselves away from the facts: death eventually comes for us all, and many changes and losses come even as we live.
We drove home from the water park with kids in tow when the weather chilled too much to be wet and came face to face with more change. Our little neighbhorhood pool was shutting down for the year. The lifeguard- here from Europe for the summer - had given up on even the pretense of watching kids swim and was packing deck furniture into the closet for winter storage.
My heart sank as I snapped a picture. Not because I long to swim, but because this is another ending. A year from now we won’t live in this townhouse that faces the pool. And this pool, as old and worn as it is, holds so many memories: my son learning to swim from a neighbor; him playing with other dear neighbors who’ve already moved away; playing catch over and over again with Greg after work; challenging our record for “keep it up” as a family of 3. Some of our sweetest summer memories happened at this pool. Precious moments lost to time, moments that can’t be held on to that only I remember and will likely forget.
It’s the sort of loss that comes with life. In one hand, I hold sorrow and longing. In another, possibility. There are moves and changes ahead that I am looking forward to: good things in the horizon. And yet, there’s always so much loss.
I am reminded of the words from scripture that say, “Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” (James 4:14)
We can’t hold onto mist. It, like life, the past, and those we love, slips through our fingers and fades away.
So I’ll keep on living with one hand full of loss and one holding on to life. This is the journey of living until death comes and we go from this temporary world to
the world of eternity.
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