In-between space

I'm really grateful for the people who support me. For the professors who understand that I cannot find the motivation to do my work today, for the friends who take me book shopping and give me hugs, for the friends who text me to check in from hundreds of miles away, for my brothers for sharing sad space with me and laughing at videos of monkeys in the snow.

It's a strange in-between space today. Some of it has to do with being so tired from staying up last night to get work done, I'm sure. Some of it is just residual sad from Max dying. I'm starting to understand why so many people write about grief-- it changes in ways I don't expect it to and is different every time. What a beast of a thing. 

In my essay class last year, which focused primarily on creative nonfiction, one of the guys wrote a brilliant and moving piece about grief. It was a braided essay (you can look that up if you want to know more. It's a cool form), and one of the strands was a story about how he had a summer job in a department store. Every day that he went to work, he passed a perfume booth lady who always offered him samples. One day, he decided, spurred by a video of a similar situation online, to yell "NO" loudly at the lady when she offered. He was sure that he had finally solved the problem. But the next day, she still offered. 

He closed his essay with a beautiful paragraph about how grief is like the people at the mall kiosks offering you samples. No matter how many times you walk past, no matter how many times you say, "no," no matter how loudly you say, "no," they are always there and will always offer. Grief is the same, he says. No matter what you tell it, how you try to avoid it, what you think about it, it will still linger. 

Analogies aren't perfect, but this one helps me understand where I am.

In this in-between space, I am caught between immediate sadness and inevitable healing and numbing with time. I am caught between being "allowed" to spin my wheels for a while and being asked to move on with my life. I am also caught between feeling loss and knowing that Daddy has bigger hands than I do, for which I am grateful.

My dog, grandma, cat, friends...they all might slip through my hands, but Daddy still holds them dearly. He happens to have this whole running-the-universe thing down pretty well. I love that even now, even as I struggle to convince myself to do my work, even as I keep encountering random sad patches, He is sovereign, good, and worth praising always. What a wonderful God.