It always happens in the shower.

That’s when I find myself revisiting memories and thinking about things I didn’t even know I was thinking about.

Ten years ago.

A decade.

Ten years ago my life looked very different.  For that matter, my shower looked different too!  For one – we had two of them. (What a gift, people – TWO showers.)   My marriage was in a good place.  My mother was alive.  The view out my front window was Virginia mountain and field and river’s edge.  I didn’t know any children by the names of Otto Fox or Piper Finn.  I wasn’t teaching school and I was tripping over diapers daily and making more scrambled eggs for hungry toddler tummies than I can even begin to recount.

My heart cannot even bear to imagine what my life will look like ten years from today.  (I am sure crossing my fingers though that it involves two showers again.)

It’s always Thanksgiving’s season, always November, when my hurt echoes back to the weeks right before my mother passed away.  The days before when we all pretended things were fine.  She was healthy enough.  We chose blind hope and weak courage.

And of course, it wasn’t real.  She was very sick, very suddenly and the end was just so rapid after all the waiting.

I still can’t stay too long in that place of memory.  I can’t quite pull up a chair and lounge around in that hospital room in my mind’s eye.

It’s a decade, you guys.  And there’s still a rawness to it.

Hurt takes a long, slow path to healing.

At least it does for me, anyway.

I’m not bothered terribly by that speed though.  That’s what ten years has taught me.  The process has value.

Nothing is wasted.

It’s a seed of a little knowledge that I have needed during these last two years on another painfully slow path to healing.

I have certainly not arrived.

But I’m not bothered so much by the people who say that I should have already arrived. Who say I should have passed the arriving and should be positioning myself on another end.

I know those people just see the outside of my heart.  And the inside of their own hearts.  Which, I’m guessing, look wildly different from one another – those two separate hearts.  Because they should.  Because they are.

I hear stories of survival through divorce or a loved one’s death from a plethora of different mouths and different faces and different hearts.  The threads are the same.  Strings that match and coordinate a little here and there.  The sting.  The sorrow.  But the path out, the path through – they’re not so strikingly similar.  They’re individual and they’re varied and they’re of such a wide range of lengths and depths and steps and turns.

There is empathy.  Sympathy.  Concern.  Shared burdens and all that.  But there’s no comparing.

We are all carrying our weight in our own way.

Shoving it down.  Burying it under work and bright sunlight.  Wallowing.  Wearing it across our furrowed brows and our broken hearts.  Dumping it overboard.  Locking it in a chest.  By turns, none of these.  By turns, all of them.

An entire decade has passed since I’ve seen my mother’s face.

Her’s was a lovely face.  One that my brother wears and one that my daughter does as well.  And I miss it.

This year for Thanksgiving I’ll be serving what my mother and I always called “corny corn bread pudding”, which I think bears very little resemblance to any type of actual cornbread or pudding.  But my oldest daughter, the one with a clear memory of my mother, requested the corny corn this year.  Regretfully, I’ve lost the scribbled recipe card in my mom’s penmanship, but I think I kind of remember the ingredients.  Two blue boxes of Jiffy cornbread seem essential.

In ten years, I’ve lost a lot.  And gained some too.  

I’ve lost a mother, my friend.  I’ve lost living on a family farm in my home state.  I’ve lost two close friends through bitter betrayal.  I’ve moved to a summer camp and left a summer camp.  I’ve lost having one daughter living under my roof.  I’ve lost my husband and a marriage just shy of two decades.  At times I’ve lost hope.  I nearly lost my unexpected last born son while he was still in the womb.  Financial security.

It’s a sobering list.

In those same years I gained a new home.  A stack of friends through that summer camp.  A baby boy whose life brings tangible joy and whose eyes sparkle all the day long.  A daughter who was born on my mother’s birthday and shares my mother’s face and her genetic tendency to worry and whose apologies are sincere and heart wrenching.  A son-in-law.  A church family that has rescued me when our universe imploded.  An adult daughter now a friend.  A small town I adore. A grandson with crinkly eyes and rowdy hair.  I’ve held hope in my hands.  Understanding.  Deep and life-affirming friendships that smell like Jesus.

It’s a sobering list.

This post is just a witness.  A witness to a decade.

Ten years of lost and found.

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