Sisters and Cousins

 

A few years ago, soon after our move to Maplehurst, I wrote this prayer on a three by five index card:

Lord, please make a way for my extended family to gather more often.

I added it to the small stack I keep in my Bible, and I regularly remembered it in prayer. The paper is softer now, the ink a little bit smeared.

Soon, my husband and I and our four children will fly to Texas for Shawn’s burial. Since the accident in January, my daughter and I have traveled to Hawaii, my husband has made two trips to be with my sister and her kids in Kansas City, we sent our older daughter and son on their own to visit grandparents and cousins. And now we fly to Texas.

My prayer has been answered, but the answer to my prayer is loss.

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I have not visited my hometown in a decade. My children have either never been or have no memory of the place, but because Jonathan and I and my sister and Shawn share the same Texas roots, we will gather there. We will gather with my parents and siblings, my nieces and nephews, my in-laws, and with Shawn’s family. We will be joined by my father’s west Texas family, by my mother’s California family, by high school friends and college friends and childhood church friends.

In Roots and Sky, I write:

“I have long wondered if home is the place from which we come or the place we are headed. The estrangement I felt from my surroundings as a child growing up in Texas has always meant that I tend to see home as my end and not my beginning.”

This is a return to our beginnings. I suspect that whatever I find there, I must bring it back with me, a little something extra tucked into my carry-on.

Home is our present and our past. Perhaps, it is time to make my own past welcome at Maplehurst.

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That index card is still tucked into the back page of my Bible. I wanted to feel angry when I read it again, but I felt, instead, some mix of fear, awe, and resignation. I believe the prayer came from God as much as the answer, so I cannot muster up any anger, just as I never, truly, mustered up that prayer.

I only received it. Repeated it. Submitted to it.

Instead of anger, I feel compassion for that other me who prayed without seeing, without understanding, but with hope. I believe the prayer was good, and so I believe that the answer is good.

It is also terrible.

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Twelve men died in those helicopters, but there will be only 9 coffins. We are all dust, and we all return to dust, but some are buried in earth and others are dust in the sea.

Some part of Shawn has been returned to us, and so we are lucky. We are blessed.

And what are blessings but those gifts that are hardest to receive?

Like this opportunity to gather. This opportunity to go home again. This chance to say hello to so many.

 

For this gift, this chance to plant our last goodbye in familiar dirt, we say thank you.

And we say, have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us.

 

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