Ring, ring

Every time the phone rings at an odd time, I wonder if it is my parents calling to tell me that Grandma has died. The phone rang twice late tonight. Not my parents... The emotional wait continues... I do not usually handle death very well. It's not that I have a fear of dying, but that I very much dislike it. I don't like change and with death comes great change. The absence of someone brings a strangeness - an awkwardness.

Both of my parents were raised in a small Iowa town of 9,000 people. My mom's family moved away when she was in college (2.5 hours away), but my dad's whole family still lives there. My dad is one of 5 kids and everyone but his family lives in the same small town. Every year, we drove to Iowa to visit my relatives. I was as close to my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins as one could expect to be, when we only saw them once or twice per year. When my grandpa died 11 years ago, the loss left a hole in my heart - but everything else about our annual visits remained similar. Now that my grandma is nearly gone, I wonder what will become of my visits. We have only visited twice since Harrison was born 6 years ago. With no grandparents, will I still visit the small town where the rest of my family lives? Will we have family reunions, or will the family forget the long lost relatives exist? What will motivate us to make the 14 hour drive? My grandparents have lived in the same house for many, many years. All of the streets in the town are numbered from the center and labeled SE, SW, NE or NW to tell you which quadrant of town they live in. Grandma & Grandpa's house is 4 blocks from my aunt & uncle's house. Out of 14 of my grandparents' grandchildren, 8 of them live in the same, small town with their kids.

I cannot imagine having grown up near my grandparents & other extended family members and I promised myself that I would never allow my children to grow up so far away from their grandparents. Right now, we live 14 hours away from both sets of our parents. Promise broken. In times like this, when I have already begun to grieve the loss that I'm about to experience, I realize how important family is to me and I long to move closer to my parents. Not too close, but certainly closer than this. "This" is my home until God makes it clear that "this" is not home.