It was a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon. I was in the middle of a pregnancy-induced afternoon nap when I woke up to movement near the bedroom door. It was Seth. He was home early but one look at his face and I knew exactly why. He has a habit of running his hands back and forth over his shaved head when he is upset. He said, "It's everywhere. Her lungs, her liver, her spine. Everywhere." It took me a few minutes to process his words. I knew what they meant but they were so terrible, they could not possibly be true. I remember shaking my head over and over again. Partly to rid myself of the shock, partly to wake myself out of the horrible nightmare I had just found myself in. Visions of walking into my grandma's room when I was only 10 years old and seeing what could only be described as a skeletal wisp of the grandmother I once knew showing up like someone pressing Rewind on my memories' DVD player. She lost the battle to an evil, wicked enemy. And now that same enemy was attacking my mother-in-law,
my mom, my friend. Grief rose within me, making it impossible to swallow, impossible to speak.
It is difficult to type this out because we are still walking down this road. A dark, rocky, blind road. We are watching our parents suffer the unimaginable. We have watched our mother's physical body diminish and weaken. We have watched our father lovingly take care of his beloved wife, beside himself with grief, yet forever pressing on. Our hope has been crushed over and over as each test result has come back negative.
I have found myself just longing for normalcy. A normalcy that even escaping to a small, remote island could not bring. Every minute of every day since that afternoon, there is a nagging sadness underneath our life's existence. Feeling joy's light from my infant daughter's smiles or from my boys' giggles is darkened a shade or two with grief. We have lost our "normal". Phone calls from our parent's house makes my heart skip a half a beat. We don't speak of the future very often. We just don't know what it will hold. It's a place we just can't go.
Since I'm in the middle of all of this and have no idea how it's going to end, I am going to say this: I know it's circumstances like these that shape the rest of our days on this earth. I have a choice. I can either stay angry and become bitter towards the Lord for allowing us to walk through such a horrific thing. Or I can seriously just run to Him and trust Him even if I don't understand what's going on. I think I choose the latter because the first choice seems so lonely and unfulfilled.
Who is this coming from the wilderness, leaning on her Beloved? (Song of Solomon 8:5) I am not out of this desert yet. I don't know when it will end or how it will end but I know this, I want to be leaning on Him. Maybe that's my new "normal".
