What now?
dividing life into before and after
It’s been a year.
(Actually fourteen months, but who’s counting?)
Daddy had a stroke. I lived with Mommy during the week while he was in rehab for two months. We tried having them live at home with in-home care. Then they moved to assisted living. Daddy passed. Mom seemed to be okay, then had some kind of “event” in April where she took a nosedive and never really recovered. She had a stroke. She passed.
That’s a lot for fourteen months. Now that that part of my life is all kind of wrapped up and over, what’s next? That’s the question I find myself asking internally almost daily. I am currently dividing my life into “with parents” and “without parents,” and I’m having a hard time figuring out where to go from here.
I have a list of projects I want to accomplish, but when hanging a towel rack takes the better part of two hours (I have coordination issues with power tools, or maybe it’s that I don’t know the difference between a drill and a driver even though my husband has patiently explained it a hundred times) (or maybe it’s that there are no fewer than five Phillips [why is this capitalized?] head thingies [what are they called?] to put in the driver [or drill . . . whatever] and how am I supposed to know which one to use?), I lose motivation.
Can you understand?
So instead, I wake up at the crack of dawn, which is significantly earlier than it was last week, and stand on the front porch in the cold and take pictures of the sunrise.
Why are sunrises so much prettier in the winter than in the summer? I bet Daddy would have a scientific explanation for that. It would be so much easier to take photos when it’s warm. (Also, I promise these are straight out of the iPhone camera. It really is this beautiful.)
Ben and I have moved at least eighteen times in our forty years of marriage. A few of those were because we got transferred with the military, but the truth is more than half of them were just because we wanted to move. I have friends who still live in the town they were born in, and that is a fascination to me. I would love to know what it feels like, but also I’ve enjoyed living in lots of different places.
But of all the homes we’ve lived in, this one is my favorite. I could sit on the porch and look out over the pasture all day. And even though I’m not a morning person, this never gets old. I wake up each morning and pull back the curtains in anticipation of what I’ll find.
I guess this is a normal part of grief, this feeling of “what do I do now?” In my head, I know the answer: Keep going. Keep being Wife and Mom and Grammy. Keep editing and taking care of the chickens and checking on the cows and learning the alto part. Get the oil changed and go for a walk and make our favorite salmon for dinner. Write another post.
But I would be lying if I said it’s easy. I’ve sat down multiple times today trying to write something read-worthy to be published Tuesday at 5 am, and I’ve come up empty every time. It’s not writer’s block so much as it is writer’s blank.
So I pay attention to what matters. The beauty of the sunrise matters. Keeping the animals healthy matters. Doing my job matters and hanging a towel rack matters.
Even though it seems kind of empty, I keep going, keep doing. I’m not living in denial or trying not to feel my grief—I promise I am feeling all the things. It’s just that all the feeling takes up so much time and mental space, it doesn’t leave a lot of capacity for anything else.
So I do the necessary things and give myself a good amount of patience and compassion. I reduce expectations. I let it just be the way it is. Around here that looks like sitting in the dirt coaxing nervous chickens to eat dried mealworms out of my hand and having conversations with sleepy calves.
Someone told me years ago that when you don’t feel like doing something, just keep doing it, and eventually your want-to will catch up.
Commit thy works unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established.
(Proverbs 16:3)
When you’ve been productivity-minded for as long as I have, it can be hard to let go of your own agenda and just see what God puts in front of you. It feels like wasting time. But I believe this is part of the process of working through what was and what will be in the future.
So every day I wake up and commit my works to him, whatever they are. I feed skittish hens and water cute calves and edit articles and take pictures of beautiful sunrises because those are the things that are here in my life right now, and if I can’t do anything else, I can be present with what the Lord gives me today, and tomorrow I will see what comes up.
I am trying to learn to do this with patience for my own humanity.
Thank you for being patient too.
Love the pictures! Beautiful sunrise!