It’d been about ten years since I’d been on a plane. I texted Josh after we’d boarded and told him it was just as awful as I remembered from the last time when I’d said there’s no way I’d do it again without some kind of calming medication. I had it with me but didn’t take it. When I started crying in my seat, my sister said, “Here Beck, get your blanket..” and she leaned over toward the floor to pull it out of my backpack.

The way they cram those rows together feels completely inhumane. Once we took off and got into the air I was more or less okay. When he and I had flown before our kids seemed way too young to have both of us die. But this time they were older and I had more peace that they’d be okay. My sister and I sat leaned up against each other while she read her magazine and I rested my eyes. I watched out the window.

We’ve had a good day of getting things done. Liz and I cleaned out the bedroom that used to be where my aunt took care of my grandpa. She had a counter full of medical supplies from herself and a closet of my grandpa’s leftover items in the closet. Whatever is unopened one is able to donate. Some of it my cousin wanted to keep. At least one garbage bag was filled from his room. They still have his ashes here.

My uncle had taken a video of my aunt about 7-8 hours before she died. She was giving pillows to her granddaughters and sharing her final words and testimony with them. It was beautiful to hear her share her faith with so much clarity and love. In a way it gave me some closure to have still been able to see her before she died. I wish that we had been able to make it sooner to be able to give her the care she’d given to others.

My uncle and cousin said she’d given them a list of end-of-life symptoms to look out for earlier that day. My uncle said they all came true. I know she would’ve loved to be here but maybe by now she’s forgotten those dreams. Everyone keeps saying it doesn’t seem real and how it feels like she’s just out at the store or should be in the next room. There seems to be a comfort we didn’t anticipate where our loved ones are never fully gone.

This morning we received a call from my cousin saying that my aunt had passed away in the night. It came as a bit of a shock even though we knew that things had not sounded good the evening before. They had just hired a full time nurse starting yesterday evening and I was eager to get down there so I could step into that role. When we found out she had passed there was some discussion that was needed to figure out how we ought to proceed with the day.

My other aunt didn’t end up flying down to Florida. One of my sisters who was supposed to fly with us drove to Kansas City in order to be with my other aunt. After talking more with my cousin and figuring some other things out, my other sister and I flew down this afternoon and landed around 4:25 eastern time.

We spent the evening with my uncle, cousin, his wife, and two girls. We are staying here at the house with the same plans to fly home Saturday morning. My cousin ordered Panda Express for supper and we passed around his phone so we could put in our orders. A few of us left to pick up the food and stop by Target. I picked up a pair of flip flops that I could wear if we go for walks. So far we’ve been talking and looking at pictures. After a while we all went to bed.

Last night the kids were looking at pictures on the computer. In the years we’ve been living at camp, I can’t believe how much they’ve changed. I looked through a few and when I saw this one of them at the beach I said, “Oooo, can you send that one to me?” But you can hardly even see us, my daughter said. “But I love those five little dots”, I told her.

I’d forgotten all about it until tonight when I opened my email. I usually scroll through looking for any messages I need to read, when I came to the subject line of Five Little Dots. It made my heart happy and I remembered again the picture. My son had also just sent a snap chat reply to my brother-in-law saying, “Can you tell her I said hi?”

“Was he saying that about me???”, I asked. And then I lost it because he was. Isn’t that crazy? How all he had to say was can you tell her I said hi and suddenly I felt so touched and I don’t know what. I know I’m emotional for other reasons but between the dots and the hi I was once again blessed. These loves of my life who were my world.

In all seriousness I’ve been feeling more and more somber the past few days. Since we made our plans to travel, the weight of the situation became all the more real. I’ve not exactly either been thrilled with the weather report that’s showing snow and windy conditions on both of the days we’re supposed travel. Tomorrow I drive up to my sister’s and my other sister drives down to her.

My other aunt has also made plans to come when we’re there. We’re hoping to be able to be a practical support for my aunt and uncle and cousin. The hospice nurse came yesterday to get everything started. You don’t consider when growing up how all these relationships are going to end. In all the moments adding up, you just know that they are family, and that these aunts of yours love you.

I spent the evening doing laundry and packing some of my bag. Classes start this week but I told one professor earlier I wouldn’t be there tomorrow and the one that was tonight I decided to skip at the last minute. I don’t know. I’m glad they’ve been so understanding. I do hope I get to come back and continue them. And so we all have made our plans. We’ll see what the Lord has in mind.

Over Christmas break I talked with my niece about the situation regarding what to call Casper. It was helpful talking to her. She and I were in agreement that Casper should be his name, but she could also understand my dilemma as I was clearly in the minority with the majority of family votes being cast for Dipstick. But something she said cleared everything up for me, so that my struggle and apprehension immediately vanished upon hearing her words. “You’ll just have to call him by his middle name,” she said.

So Casper is his middle name and that’s what I call him. He and Tom were in a fight during a walk today. I had sandals on and didn’t want to walk through the wet leaves but I did. Calling to them wasn’t doing anything. Cats will attack each other and bite each other to where some of them have had some pretty bad abscesses as a result of bite marks. I wanted to throw my glove at Tom, but he really wasn’t doing anything wrong either. They were being cats. I tried to get them mostly away from each other.

This afternoon I finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking. I was feeling bad that maybe I had spoken rashly about the book or been too hard in my judgements. The last third was probably my favorite and contained more of what I’d been wanting to read which was more personal commentary on the events of her life. If I get at least one memorable line from a book then I am usually happy. This one was found in the opening chapters. The rest of the book was fine, but no other lines topped this one.

This was in reference to her and her husband’s routine of walking every morning in New York City’s Central Park. She says, “We did not always walk together because we liked different routes but we would keep the other’s route in mind and intersect before we left the park (p.36).” I thought this was a beautiful line that spoke to the individual nature of persons (having/liking different routes) yet acknowledges the action of love in concretely knowing another’s way and making the effort to find each other en route.

This was much more romantic to me than the reel I saw on Instagram that said maturing in marriage is realizing that nobody cuddles when falling asleep, and that instead, one partner snores while the other scrolls social media until their eyes get blurry. Not to bash someone else’s marriage or content creation or attempts at humor. Reels sometimes can really make me laugh. Lots of people commented that they actually do cuddle with their husband or wife before falling asleep. I was glad they did.

I started reading a book called The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It’s a memoir written by a woman following the sudden death of her husband who suffered cardiac arrest one evening while eating dinner. Simultaneously she writes about her daughter who has been near death in the ICU at least twice since the book started. I’m a little over halfway through and not really enjoying it, but I’m in with it now.

The book came recommended a while ago by another author–John Blase? He’s one of those writers, who at one time, could take away my breath by the things he would say. So naturally I am curious to what kinds of things he reads and what books he would recommend. I have bought multiple books over the years that he has liked and recommended and have never liked a single one. I don’t remember where I heard of it.

The Bible talks about those who grieve yet have no hope. From what I can tell, the magical thinking spoken of is referring to the things our minds do to try and make sense of terrible things and insulate us from things that are in the moment too comprehend. For the believer these things are filled in for us, or at least we have something to set our mind to in the gift of God’s word. Many people do not have this.

The book is made up mostly of the chronicling of events in that detached and emotionless way one does at times when writing about something considerably jarring. The front cover contains a review that states, “Stunning candor and piercing details…An indelible portrait of loss and grief.” I tend to think there’s way too much flattery in most book review blurbs, though it could just be me. I am hard to please with these things.

Two of my sisters and I made plans to fly to Florida next week to visit my aunt. The report from my cousin is one of rapid decline. I’ve been trying to process the situation, both on my own and with other family members. These events have a way of revealing odd family dynamics that you knew were there but hadn’t necessarily seen in a while. But they also have a way of bringing people together in ways that set aside differences.

My son has a birthday today, the one born on Epiphany. Miles and Graham are here at the moment. They all just set up the game Ticket to Ride. I think Miles is staying for supper and coming to church. My mother-in-law will be here as well. Tomorrow Josh is planning to take Ethan back to school and if we end up squeezing it in I still want to give him a haircut before he goes. Our present for my son arrived in the mail this afternoon.

Yesterday after pulling into the Hae’s parking lot I had a moment of needing to process emotions. Sometimes processing is just living through it, stopping when you need to and then continuing on. This is life in a fallen world where family members pass and the Lord’s divine allowances don’t always make sense to our finite minds. But the gift of loss contains a greater appreciation of the present, of hugs and games and brighter things.

Josh and I took the boys to school this morning. We’ve still been trying to do these coffee dates on Fridays. This is definitely one of those things where it’s the act of making something important that counts. The tea isn’t anything I couldn’t have at home. The idea of forcing yourself to do something used to sound so unromantic to me, and I wouldn’t even say it’s forcing yourself. It’s choosing everyday to live awake to what is truly important.

To where going to get coffee on Fridays because the no brainer and of course I am going to get coffee with you. On the way there I thought one of the boys looked sick or down or some kind of “off” to me. Something I’ve noticed with the younger kids is that I am sometimes not as quick to notice demeanors or moods. You just start to get used to people beginning to manage more for themselves and forget that there are others who still are in another stage.

So he ended up staying home and I made up a bed on the couch where he rested for a good majority of the day. I looked through assignments and tried to pull up a google doc to type out my list of everything that was due. My google storage was full and wouldn’t let me start new docs or edit an old one. My son went into my gmail and deleted a bunch of unread messages, so that freed up some space to where I had a little more again.

After supper Dad went down to check on the fire he’d made to burn old piles of firewood. He and the boys drove down in the truck. His dad donated his pickup truck to camp which has been nice because we were definitely in need of a better working vehicle. There was a broken green one that sat outside of our house for a couple of years. I felt like it blocked my open view of the skyline but it also didn’t seem like one of those things worth making a big deal about.

Laura came over for supper tonight. I said it was fine if she comes but he was going to have to help me clean today which he did. The other kids were back to school and dad was back to a normal day of work. Her mom texted me around 1:15 to let me know Laura was on her way and to thank me for having her. He’s been there the past two times and I think this is the last time they see each other before heading back to college. She wants to be a social worker.

Earlier this morning my aunt shared news that the doctors said there’s nothing else they can do for her treatments. We sort of knew this was coming but it didn’t make the news any easier to hear. I felt like I needed to take a minute to recalibrate my brain, and yes, my heart and my mind. I’m sure you can hear it when I write, the way my mind just kind of goes, without stopping to extract and absorb what I am needing from all of these various experiences.

I start to get this feeling like I’m on a horse that’s taken off and I don’t know how to slow it down. I was feeling anxious today about starting back with school and like maybe I just needed to drop one of my classes, like when you’re skiing and your feet start to spread apart too far. They need to come back closer together where I can have a better footing. I’m still in school. These other things come second to that which I’m in the middle of and committed to doing.

I feel like I said all kinds of stupid things yesterday. First of all, I am not going to read City of God. It’s too long. Second, I am perfectly aware that Lent has nothing to do with second chances at fasting and reorganizing your life, in that the point is not to be engaging in personal self-improvement projects or practicing spiritual disciplines in the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law. I don’t even know if I said that right.

But I did buy the City of God book yesterday, along with another one. Next to Augustine was Selected Writings by Thomas Aquinas. That one I could probably read. I tried to read Confessions earlier in the year and lost interest pretty quickly. Just in the very little of these two theologians that I’ve read, I think I like Thomas Aquinas better. So I used my Barnes and Noble gift card for two new books to add to our library.

I’m not scheduled for any more shifts until later next week. Last night I was able to come home early because they were short on summer day shift today. I asked if I could come back and work it and just reschedule my spring evening training for another time. So today it was me and one of the assistant directors of nursing who is responsible for filling in shifts during days when the floor staffing is short. I was glad she was there.

At some point I’m going to have to be able to do this on my own but I am definitely not at that point yet. She picked up a lot of my slack when it came to calling in orders and doing a monthly assessment on the hospice patient who I could not get to wake up to take her medicine. She came in there and was able to do it. I saw Laura’s dad who was there visiting one of his parishioners and thought of our parents on the drive home.

Tonight Dad wanted to take everyone out to dinner as an end of Christmas break/back-to-school acknowledgment. After that we walked around in a store called Sierra. He found some soap and I found a soft pair of wear around the house pants so I don’t have to wear out my green ones as fast. These ones are light pink. The boys found snowpants. I saw a pink 12lb kettlebell but decided that would not be necessary.

I made myself a giant pot of chicken and rice soup, with baked acorn squash mixed in to deepen the broth. I shared it with everyone yesterday, but they’ll move on to other things. It’ll last the next two to three days at least. This section of winter is one of my favorite stretches of time. With the holiday season now behind us, there’s the season between New Year’s and whenever Lent starts.

Then you have the slow climb out of the dark days, from Lent to Easter where you are given a second chance at fasting and reorganizing your life. By the time Easter comes it seems like years since Ash Wednesday, and people keep talking about spring finally arriving, when in fact it is only what some have called fake spring. It takes another six weeks for the weather to turn and become summer.

The kids slept in until almost eleven today. Dad was up early but fell back asleep on the couch while reading. Even the early birds can’t ignore nature’s cues, though they’ll be back by mid-February. I told him I like when he sleeps in, but I don’t remember when I woke up. We didn’t have Augustine’s City of God. They had it at Barnes and Noble so I might try and stop by on my way over to work on Spring.