Maggie

My grandmother, Maggie, passed away on Thursday. I have tried to write this into my blog over the last couple of days, but it just felt strained and stretched and unnatural. But it must be written about. Or at least said.

My grandmother passed away, and aside from the most obvious loss of her, I am also feeling the loss of being able to go through this with my mother and the rest of my family. You get an email from your mother telling you about what happened, you cry, you mourn, and then you step outside, and you're in...Auckland, New Zealand. And trying to relate that to anything in your back-home life just doesn't work.

So you walk down the street for a few minutes and suddenly, it's like it didn't happen at all. The sadness, the facts, have slipped into some nowhere place in your head. Some space where you put things that you don't get or don't want to get. And you call home because you want to call home and you want to be there for your mom, but when she's on the line, she feels a million miles away. And she is.

And you try to think about your family during the day and wonder what they're doing. The extended family has come into town, your brother has flown in. Everyone is gathering, but where are you? What are you doing?

Living your life, I guess, is what you are doing. But what a loss - to not be able to grieve with your loved ones. To not be able to support from the other side of the world. To hope that they know that you're thinking about them all the time.

The bright shiny part of all of this is that I was able to say goodbye to Maggie. I was able to tell her everything I wanted to tell her. I sat with her for a long time last Thursday, before I left Nashville. And I reminded her that I was leaving again, and we both knew what that meant. And she said, Thank you. Those were her last words to me. She understood.

I won't try to write a tribute to her here. It would take me weeks to put something like that together for someone like her. But I had to mention it. Because it's part of this trip. And it's one of the reasons that people don't take trips like this. What if...? But you can't say what if. I can't say what if, at least. So we keep going, hoping we've made the right decisions and doing our best. That is all I can do.

Much love.