finality.

I got to thinking about the concept of finality this week for an odd reason. I was talking to my grandma on the phone to wish her a Happy Mother's Day. She's doing well and we were just catching up, but the conversation pulled with an irresistible magnetism toward Paw.. I didn't want to talk about him, so I was frustrated with myself, but it's so hard not to. She mentioned that she's doing OK, but gets sad. "It's just so final," she says.

For some reason, that sentence really resonated with me. It's so true, but I haven't really processed it in that sense. It's easy for me to mourn and then live on, because I rarely saw Paw Paw in his last year of life. But it's much harder for me to really let go. It's been sort of interesting as I've moved away from home to fully grasp how my relationship to home has changed and morphed. In some ways, my relationships and places and people have been and will remain more or less the same, but in some ways they are really dramatically different. I've become more disconnected than I want to admit.

For example, it's so hard to believe and really hold on to the fact that my paw paw won't ever be home again when I visit… Ironically, I suspect it may be an easier process of closure for my family who have been around and seen him often to let him go then for me.

I went through this process only once before, and that was when my house burned down. It won't ever be there again, and that is so hard to believe. But I wasn't there to scrape through the remains and clean and scrub and cry over thing after thing like my parents did… They know for sure that it is gone. For me, it's like something deep down inside me really honestly believes that one day, I will go home and my house will be there. And so will Paw Paw. Because how can they not?

I think the main reason I am having such a difficult time with "closure" is that I'm not there. For my family, it is a change in daily life. The events have changed routines and rituals. For Maw Maw, it is even more. An actual moment to moment reminder that he is gone. For good. For me, I go home once in a blue moon now from my silly crazy far away adventure, and I expect things to be just as I left them. Always. But it won't be. Ever.

I'm really starting to process this notion now that I have again taken a leap away. Even farther this time, which I swore I wouldn't do… I'm excited, this job is designed for me and I'm salivating over more adventure and exploration, but it is admittedly a step farther away. No doubt about it.

I've also been twirling this concept of finality in my mind as my residency comes to a close. I'm finding peace, elation, and sadness in the finality of certain endings... Like, for example, the fact that I may actually never have to see 12 patients over 3.5 hours ever again... That I might never deliver another baby. I may never be required to fill out FMLA or disability paperwork for back pain, or forms for school or LDS mission physicals. Who knows if I will ever do a well-child check again? Or persuade another obese person that "yes, coke is bad for you. i'm sorry that is such a surprise concept." It is strange that these things which have been my routine and my work for the past 3 years are now coming to a close in a final sense, and now I will regain control over some of these decisions again..

I'm beginning to think that one of the truly unsatisfying things about my current lifestyle and trend is that it feels as if nothing is final, so I am unable to really feel the truth of it. Everything is temporary, nothing means much. Even residency, which has seemed so permanent, was a temporary cycle to survive. A simple 3 years. My current life is just about exploring for temporary periods, with the clear intention that some day I will return to my own Finality. My world of comfort and truth at Home. There, things will be the way they are, and it will be real again… Except without my house, without paw paw… and who knows what else awful might change within the next few years away while I am out playing… I've already firmly warned my other grandparents that they can never leave me, but what about my brothers! They will graduate and move out of my parents home. Forever. In such a final sense. How strange a concept that there will be a day, quite soon, when I will go home and my brothers won't be there…

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"You can never go home again." ~Thomas C Wolfe

"You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right." ~Maya Angelou