People are seriously weird sometimes. Two days ago I was feeling inspired and ready to just do the whole internship thing and finish my schooling. Even yesterday after practicum I sent my supervisor an email making sure we were both on the same page with what we’d talked about regarding splitting my internship between the partial hospitalization program and the inpatient hospital unit.

And then I was having all kinds of doubts. I sent my husband a text from school around 9:00PM saying that I was fine doing the classes and getting those done, but I didn’t think I wanted to try and do the internship also. I miss my family just thinking about it. And being home. And doing laundry. And being in my happy place with my people who aren’t here as much as they used to be but are still here.

So then I had this phone interview this morning with an HR person from the local Lutheran Senior Services. “Let’s go through your work history”, she said, and I went through the jobs I had listed on my resume that included two years working at Greene House Assisted Living in Seward and the long-term care unit connected with the county hospital and time as a student nurse on the post-op floor.

And all of this was over 15+ years ago. I’m not sure yet if this is going to be a problem. I did ask about the acuity level of patients and whether or not she thinks the gap in experience is going to be an issue with the specific position involved which is one that only requires a minimum of two shifts a month but you can always do more. They try to keep a pool of added nursing staff to fill in scheduling gaps.

I’m scheduled to meet with the nursing director tomorrow so we’ll see how that goes. Tonight we start our Multicultural Awareness class. It’s with the hard instructor again. I’ve basically gotten over the actual turmoil from the last class and the paper grade that for whatever reason felt like such a hard blow. The presentation didn’t end up being worth what I’d originally thought so I still was able to do okay in the class.

I’m really liking the new windows in the dining room. Truthfully I have not had time to appreciate them much over the past few weeks. This morning I had practicum from 8:30-1. I came home, ate some lunch, and have been in bed mostly since. Sometimes it’s sleepiness, where I take a 20 minute nap and I’m good to go for the rest of the day. Other times like today it’s more bodily fatigue where I’m more twitchy and have that buzzing feeling in my limbs.

It’s days like this where I really question whether it’s even possible to do this full internship thing next semester. I’ve been leaning more lately toward wanting to do it. They’ve waived several of the normal internship requirements. It means we’d be able to continue with our current supervisor and site instead of having to find a new one. We also would be able to get started on acquiring our hours this semester as soon as we fulfill our hour requirements for practicum. As of now I’ve been cruising along at a comfortable 7-9 hours a week.

But now I feel this pressure like I need to hurry up and get going. The more time I would have this semester the better. In addition we would be able to accumulate hours over break. I tried to do some math to come up with a general estimate on what my weekly hour requirement would be if I could finish practicum and get started the week or two before Thanksgiving. Not including the weeks surrounding Christmas and New Year’s, and substracting the week of the spring intensive, it comes out to around 25 hours per week. When I calculated for a 16-week semester it came out to more around 35 but I also forgot to subtract the spring intensive week.

So school would basically turn into this nice little thing I’ve mostly been doing on the side to something that would take up a much larger part of my life. I get that people work full time 40+ hours a week all the time and still do other things in their life but that is not the life I have lived and frankly I’m not sure I could healthily do that. I also need to leave room for class time two nights a week plus the homework. I could maybe see me doing it if I lived in bed when I was home.

I don’t know. I am not needing to make any decisions this instant but I am hoping that as classes start back up again this week we’ll get a little more information regarding what our other options would be. In other correspondence it’s been said that any student who isn’t graduating would have an individualized plan already set up with a specific institution based on arrangements made by the school. I do miss the days of being more available for the wife and mom things.

The boys and I picked up pine cones this afternoon. I’d gone outside for a short walk and they were playing. I must have looked happy to see them because one of them asked, “Mom, why do you always seem so happy to see us out here?” The were filling up a garbage bag with pine cones to make a fire.

I don’t know, I said, I just like seeing you play. Then I had the idea to start collecting pine cones too. I wanted one of those massive plastic garbage cans you see in town on garbage day. It seemed like we could use them for kindling or something. I found one of the bins in the garage where we’d kept the racoons at first.

So then I started collecting my own. The pine trees outside our house are full of them right now. Pretty soon they came over to where I was and started helping me fill my bin. Another one had found two other buckets and filled them both with fallen pine needles. After that I think we still were outside for a while.

The kids are all done with their cross country seasons. After the meet this morning my mother-in-law took us out to lunch at a corner café in Petersburg. It was actually pretty nice. We go out to eat a lot it seems, or at least it seems like we have been lately. Between that, the leftover funeral food, and the nearly full gallon of potato salad that someone brought over, we’ve eaten something together almost daily for weeks.

She paid for the bill like they always do. Miles came with us because he had come to watch the meet. I have not personally asked anyone about Laura anytime recently but Josh said he asked about it on the way back to Nebraska. The boys also said that Ethan talked to her several nights on the phone while he was home. It’s apparently still something that is going on. We’ve morphed a little bit as time as gone on into a family that is open about some things and not as much about others. Even I have changed into this. It is a very weird thing to not just be able to ask and say what comes to mind.

I cleaned out the freezer this morning before the meet. It’s the whole nesting thing again where you have to prepare. I wanted to see what was in there and dig around for any leftover soup bone I’d saved from other times. Right before I got sick I’d planned on learning how to use the instant pot I’d received for Christmas. I want to try making broth in there because I’ve heard you can make it in four hours instead of 18-24.

If I am going to do this school thing then I am going to need to take care of myself. One of the first papers we had to write was a student plan for self-care. I went back and read it just to see what I’d said that my plan was. My two main things were taking care of my body and staying connected to others. At my practicum site one of the things they do in the groups at the end of the day is ask what the patients are going to do for self-care, or “acts of kindness” as my supervisor calls them. I’ve been a little amazed by how many people say they’re going to brush their teeth in the evening and not just the morning.

I wish I could go into things deeper than I do here. I think we are all dealing with the recent loss in our own way. It feels still very hard to believe that my father-in-law will no longer be with us. He has been such a present part of our lives for so long that it’s hard to imagine him never being there again. Josh and the boys played catch this evening. I asked the boys how they were doing and they said it helps knowing where Papa is.

I have some decisions that need to be made regarding school. There are a number of us who are close enough to graduation that there is the possibility for us to graduate this May. For me this would require doing a full internship where I do all my hours in one semester instead of spread out between two semesters. I would also have to take the spring intensive and another class that I would take whenever the professors can work it into the schedule along with the two classes I was already taking.

For the next quarter I added a class just in case I decide to do this which would eliminate me having to take a May intensive form of it. I honestly do not know what the right thing to do is. On one hand I’m kind of intrigued by the challenge and excited about the prospect of graduating early. But on the other hand cramming that many classes along with an internship into one semester seems to go against everything we’ve been taught in school so far regarding self-care and burn-out.

I’ve also been applying for nursing jobs. Part of me just wants to take a break from the school meaning that I just let whatever I have left be spread out and end up taking probably another semester or two longer. That way I can get a part-time job and start generating some income and building back some work experience. One was a hospice nurse position and another was a position at a senior service facility. I need to pray about it and ask God for guidance. I’m asking for family opinions too.

It’s not that I am against work. It’s that I am against unnecessary work. As a pastor’s wife for now over 15 years I have gotten very good at identifying where there is excess work happening in the church arena that at least in my opinion are things that could be pared down or eliminated. One of these things happens to be the way our church does their Christmas Eve services. In the past there is an evening children’s program, a regular Divine Service evening program, and then a midnight service.

Christmas and Easter seasons for pastors are like their big times of the year where they get to give it their all and be proud of how much work they are doing. I don’t mean that in a bad way or think that is something that needs to be taken from them. Those are particularly busier times for them, and sometimes busier is good. You get a rush and high from it and find purpose and joy in it. But when your children’s program is designed for a 30+ children Sunday School and yours currently is much smaller, then it’s time to reconsider the way the church does things. When your program in the past was directed by an elite musician and paid DCE, and now what you have is a volunteer mom and a handful of volunteer teachers, it’s time to consider changing things.

We had another meeting at church tonight. I have told them that I am not going to continue on the board after my term ends at the end of the year. I also brought up that I do not want to be the one in charge of and organizing the Christmas program this year. I did it last year, along with the breakfast in Bethlehem event that I was not fully on board with, and in the month of December along with everything else, I was so completely stressed. I still want to have some semblance of peace and enjoyment in the holiday season without it being completely overtaken by parts-assigning, practices, and paper writing overload. I am trying to speak up and communicate my needs but it seems like I sure do have a lot of them. I need margin and space in my life.

My mother-in-law was listing off all of the area widows that she knows. She mentioned how it’d be nice to have some sort of support group where they could meet once a month and get together. That is the kind of church work I would have no problem doing. One of the local churches used to have a parish nurse who was involved in creating these kinds of support groups. She visited sick members and was very involved with ministering to individuals and families. This again is the kind of thing I’d like to do. At the funeral luncheon a friend and I were standing there peering into the church kitchen admiring the women hard at work with the food. Not everybody in there loves what they do.

Our time will come, she said. The time for us to be the church ladies. When we are the older ones scurrying around on a weekday afternoon. I do want so much to be more involved in ministry work but my life right now seems to allow such little time for it. You keep thinking there will be a better time, when the kids are older, or older still, or life isn’t so busy, or when I’m more healed. It doesn’t seem from what I’ve heard that life really slows down all that much. People are always talking about how busy things are and how much is going on in their life even as their children are grown. And yet I know there has to be space that comes somewhere. It’s not that I want to get out of work. It’s that I want to be best spent wherever it is being done. There’s always work to do here.

My mother-in-law took everybody out for supper tonight. One of my flaws is that about half of the time when we go out to eat I get annoyed by all the cars in the parking lot and start to judge all of the people who are too lazy to stay home and cook. Really, on a Wednesday night, I have no idea why a restaurant parking lot would be so full.

My brother-in-law and nieces are heading back tomorrow. Josh takes Ethan back to school tomorrow as well. He’s planning on dropping him off and coming home in one day. I told him I didn’t recommend doing that but he’d rather do that than pay for a hotel. My sister-in-law is thinking she will buy a ticket to fly home this weekend.

Toward the end of last week I received a text from one of my classmates saying that our school is closing at the end of the school year. They’re working to figure out transfer arrangements. It has taken some of the wind out of my sail as far as school goes so I’m not looking forward to starting back up. It’ll all work out how it’s meant to.

Today was my father-in-law’s funeral and yesterday was the visitation. Josh preached the sermon for the funeral and it was as close to perfect as one could get for a dad’s funeral. I wondered about him preaching at first but when I asked him about it he said he thought his dad would have wanted him too. I think there was also a little bit of wanting to make sure the job was done right and with both things I can understand.

His dad was proud of his son being a pastor. It still feels just so hard to believe that we will never again see him alive on this earth. I keep thinking he’s still around somewhere, like it just can’t be real that his voice, his body, his walk, his everything is going to be so much different. We know that things like this happen here, but it wasn’t supposed to happen for at least another 20 years. At least in our simple, finite minds it wasn’t.

I know this new normal will come again in it’s time. Everyone from church has been very kind and supportive, multiple churches actually. There were multiple members from our current church family, a select closer few who came up from Hoyleton, and also many from my in-laws church. After the funeral luncheon we went home for a while before coming back for a home cross country meet. After that we all went home again for the evening.

This evening we took the kids out to visit the farm. After that we went back to my mother-in-law’s house for supper. We’re already finding ourselves tripping over words and catching ourselves wondering what the right thing to say is. After church we had plans to attend the annual brunch for the high school. In the church parking lot I asked Josh, “Are we meeting your parents at their house or just…” We met his mom and sister there.

Both my husband’s parents have large extended families that live in the area. People have brought over plenty of food on and off since hospice started so that no one has really had to worry about cooking. After eating we went to Kohl’s to try and find clothes for the kids to wear for the visitation and funeral. We did an inventory earlier this afternoon and made a list of who needed what. I told my mother-in-law that we could tell she had been busier lately because most everyone was in need of nicer pants and shoes that fit.

She said she misses all that and I said we did too. After Kohls we went back to the house to wait for my brother-in-law and nieces. They left Dallas this afternoon and flew into St. Louis. His brother works at a rental car company so they got a discount on a rental car. We waited for them to get there but didn’t stay too much longer after their arrival. I was ready to be home and settled in for the night. I wanted them to have their time together too.

It’s been a busier past couple of days with Josh’s dad. Wednesday we picked up the boys and then went over to my in-laws house. I was leaving that day to pick up Ethan from school. He had his fall break this weekend and the plan was for me come out Wednesday, spend the night, and then drive back Thursday after his class was over at 11. But when we got there Wednesday Josh’s dad had taken a notable turn.

I have been around a lot of dying people. There’s a look people have when they are nearing death. I told Ethan I didn’t think we’d have enough time to get back. I’ve been keeping him updated through the hospice process and he’d already planned on bringing home his books in case he needed to stay a little longer. One of the boys and I left for Nebraska around 1PM and we got back to Springfield just after 2:30AM.

One of Ethan’s teammates was able to drive him into Lincoln which helped tremendously to shorten the trip. Josh was sleeping in the room with his dad that night and I asked if he thought we would make it back in time. He said yes. The rest of the kids were also staying the night that night at my in-laws house. After Ethan had some time with him he came to bed where several of us were sleeping in the living room.

Three of the kids went to school the next day. The rest of us hung out and my in-laws house and spent time in and out of my father-in-law’s room. Josh, his sister, and his mom went to a gravesite service for a long time family friend at 1:30. The boys and I stayed with John and were there when the nurse and bath aide came. One of the pastors came over at 3PM with his guitar to sing songs and to pray. I had originally thought that we were past the singing hymns around the deathbed point, but I turned out to be wrong. It was a beautiful time and the pastor was breath of fresh joyful air.

The big kids left for cross country practice around 3:30, right when the pastor was leaving as well. Ethan went with his sister to run with the team. The rest of us stayed in the room and were just sitting there and visiting. Around 4:23ish my father-in-law opened his eyes very wide and looked up and to the side. I stood up and went over closer to him. For a split second I was thinking he was looking at the pictures on the wall. I left the room to get Josh who was resting on the couch. I couldn’t find his sister at first, but then my mother-in-law suggested the front porch, which is where she was.

He died around 4:25 on Thursday afternoon. In the room with him was my mother-in-law, my husband, my sister-in-law, my father-in-law’s sister, myself, and the three boys. I knew the other two wouldn’t make it back in time but I texted my son say that Papa was moving to heaven now. They were back about an hour later. People stayed in the room for a very long time and some never left it until the funeral home people came around 7:30PM. I’d never been there for that part. They were not in there very long before they rolled him into the living room for anyone who wanted to say goodbye.

We slept at the house again that night. My mother-in-law mentioned the idea of putting the floor mattress in the room where my father-in-law was just so it wouldn’t be so cramped in the living room. I don’t normally have much disagreement with her suggestions but this time I did say that I thought it was too soon. Five of us slept in the living room, two in the back bedroom, and my sister-in-law with her mom in her room. I actually liked all sleeping together. One of the blessings of this new house they’ve built is that it will have two floors with ample living space for the entire family to spread out.

I was realizing this at some point over the last week. I’d been more upset and bothered about how he wasn’t going to be able to live in his house even though this had been his dream and so much a part of what he worked for. But it occurred to me then that even this likelihood and possibility hadn’t stopped him from building it. He hadn’t build the house for him. He’d had it built for all of us and he has a much better house now than we do. Yesterday all of the kids went to school. After some time apart with everyone busy doing their separate and different things, we will gather again for the feast of God.