Hard to Leave

The last time I wrote about going up to Alexandria for a family reunion, I recalled a billboard that said Alexandria was easy to get to and hard to leave. Well I made an overnight trip up to Alex on Sunday, and it was again, easy to get to and hard to leave. I went up last minute to visit my brother Steve in the hospital, he’s been fighting lung and bone cancer and his time is running out. We don’t like to run out of anything, that’s why we have convenience stores, right? Running out of time, though, that is hard, and it’s hard for my brother and all of us. We want to hang on, to slow it down, to stop the days now. But we can’t.

So, the trip up North was a peaceful, if not sad, drive for me. Once I was there with family, it was terribly hard to leave. Even the drive back, coming back into the city was hard on me. I’m not a long-distance driver to begin with, and it’s times like these that it’s hard not to be resentful that I’m single. Like God, if there is one, thinks that I’m just such a tough soul, I can handle anything, alone. Hard to go back to work, as if my whole life isn’t shifting. Hard not to wonder about the meaning of life.

I’m realizing that meaning making is a part of each day. That as we live, we go about finding meaning. Meaning making is shifting for me as I’m learning meditation. Meditation is helping me to slow down, which means that as I’m greedy to make every moment count, I can step back a bit from my greed, and relax.

Meditation can take me, in my grief, a few steps back, to look at the sadness, the numbing sense of loss, and put it in the larger context which is my life. Which is my family of origin, which for me has often been a source of pain and confusion; and give me the ability to also see with clarity, the value my family has of simply being there, for each other in our hard times.

So we gathered, and as I’m home, my family is still gathering in Alexandria. My brother Steve is now at home, on the Lake. My younger brother is flying in from CA, my oldest sister drove five hours last weekend to be there. There are eight of us sibs, and we’re almost all of us taking the time to be there; my brother will not be alone. With eight of us growing up, alone was something we rarely were.