Day 115

This morning I woke up at 5:00 a.m. in Kearney, Nebraska and drove for seven hours to my home in Colorado Springs.  This followed ten hours of driving from the previous day, which was preceded by my grandpa’s funeral and graveside service mere hours before.  The day before that, Monday, was the visitation.  On Saturday, my family and I started at 4:00 in the morning and drove for eighteen hours to my grandpa’s bedside and said our last goodbyes, only about nine hours before he passed away on Sunday morning.   The preceding week was a stressful day by day, hour by hour existence waiting for the phone call that never came that my Grandpa had passed on from this life and was now with Jesus. 

It’s been a hard week and a half.

Emotionally, I’m doing pretty well.  Physically, I’m worn out. 

Grief affects everyone differently, and it shows up unexpectedly.  For me, I did most of my grieving for my grandpa before he passed away.  It took me a couple of days to work through it, and then for the most part I was alright. I still cry sometimes, but my soul is at peace for my grandpa.  The grief that remains is for the people that remain, because I can’t feel sad for my grandpa.  I know he is with Jesus and is experiencing the greatest, happiest, most wonderful existence any creature can have.  He was a faithful follower of Jesus in this life, and he is receiving his reward for his faithfulness.   But for the rest of us, we have to wait for that.  We said goodbye, and we know it’s not forever, but it is long enough to be hard.  We who remain have to live the rest of our time on earth without the man who was a faithful husband, a loving father, a proud grandpa, and a tender great-grandpa.  We mourn because our lives are poorer without the man who made them richer. 

After living in a vacuum for the last two weeks, where everything I did or planned depended on what was happening with my grandpa, it is a little hard to jump back into regular life. Dinner needs to made.  Cars need to be filled up with gas.  I have a job I need to go to.   I can put stuff on the calendar again.  When someone you love dies, you want life to stop for a while to give you time to adjust.  But it doesn’t.  Life continues to spin at a dizzying pace, and just like a merry-go-round, you just have to jump in and hang on. Although it’s hard at the beginning, I think it’s better this way.  If you spend too much time wrapped in your sorrow and loss, it’s easy to become very self-focused and it just becomes harder for you to get back to the new normal.   We all eventually have to learn how to live again. 

I loved my grandpa and I will miss him very much.  But when the day comes that God calls me home, that day will be the beginning of the time where there will be no more sorrow, nor tears, nor death nor pain, because Christ has conquered those things for those who love him.  I live today in the hope that one day there will be no more goodbyes.  All that will be left is an eternity of todays with the ones that I love in the presence of the One who loved us first.

Dedicated to my Grandpa, Al Peterson (1921-2012)