This Fragile Life

I have never known loss to this extent until now. Sure, I've grieved situations and relationships in the past and those bring with them their own pain but losing someone to the inescapable reality of our mortality is a completely different feeling. To know that you won't get to see the person's smile on their face anymore, that you won't get to hear their stories, that they have told oh-so many times before, anymore is... overwhelming. On one hand it's "better" to have already anticipated the person's passing rather than having them go suddenly but when the case is a slow deterioration of the mind, to the point where they are unable to communicate in the end is unbearable. In my last conversation, I had a feeling that this may have been it. That I wouldn't ever get to have a conversation again. At the same time, part of me was holding on to the hope that I would, maybe, get to see his face again, asking him to repeat all the stories he told me as a kid. Back then I would be begging, in my mind, for him to stop because I had heard it all before. Now these stories are escaping my memory and that scares me. It scares me how fragile our memories and our lives really are. And there is no escaping from it.

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I remember how I would visit my grandparents every once in a while as a kid. My favourite thing to do was to go rollerblading with my Oma down their street, up a little hill, and then along endless amounts of farmland, all the way to the forest. I would race ahead, come back, circle her, and every once in a while we would stop and just watch the cows go about their day.
In the mornings my Opa would walk to a farm to get fresh milk from the farmer. I loved coming with him. I can still clearly remember the road we would walk down, filled with beautiful wild flowers to the left and endless amounts of forest to the right. On the ground? Mostly cow dung but hey, you take the bad with the good. When we finally got to the farmer I would run towards the calfs while he fetched the milk. I never had much of a desire to live on a farm (city girl at heart), but every once in a while it was simply magical watching and petting little calfs, all the while the German Shepard stood guard and barked.
This was more than a decade ago and I would give anything to have one more of those days to truly treasure it.

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Five years ago I took a short flight with my grandparents and to be completely honest, it's frustrating enough navigating through a massive airport by yourself, never mind having two elderly people in tow who don't speak a lick of English. As I look back, however these things become less of an inconvenience and more of time spent together that I should have cherished right then and there. But we never do, because we don't think about the fact that any minute and every moment we spend with people could very well be our last. I'm not one for creating paranoia and being constantly scared of what happens to people when we're not with them but at the same time, I think it would do us all some good to appreciate the time we spend with people more.

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Right now I'm resting in the assurance of God's sovereignty over all. Rather than asking Him why he took him away, I want to thank him for allowing me to have a relationship with such an amazing man of God.