Saying good-bye to 2020 seems like an easy thing to do. So much has been lost. But as I pause to reflect there has also been many gifts.
While I have missed my family of children and grandchildren to the point of physical pain, I have also learned how deeply important each of them is to me. They are my life. I look forward to the day when not only we can be together again - something I took for granted - but for the day that I will live in their midst again. No one can say what that will look like today but I know that it will happen again. A year ago, I might have thought that I would stay in Florida until my kids had to move me out but now my heart begs to be with them again in the everyday of life. I miss being a part of the ordinary - the walks to schools, the "let's get coffee," the stop by to visit that is simply impossible now. I miss being with, being together, being part of a bigger thing.
The gift of being with my parents in 2020 has been like nothing I could have imagined. I learned to protect myself for their sake. I gave up what I knew to be my life in order to be assured that I had kept them safe from the Corona virus. The sacrifice of me as their child has not been unlike the sacrifices I made for my own children. The child has now become the caretaker.
I have missed church and being in community with other believers. I joined the church in January and the last service I attended was in March. Here it is 9 months later. Church has become a spectator sport on a video screen. This is a dichotomy for me because I have certainly learned to lived without it and go on. There are so many options on-line that have kept my spiritual live growing deeper and deeper. I'm not sure what this means going forward. Maybe it's not church but the gathering.
Gathering has been the word for this year. It is what I have missed the most. Gathering for holidays and celebrations, gathering for meetings, gathering for church. The inability to come together has been the missing piece, the piece I don't want to go on without. I am not a people person but I am a person person. I want to be together with my someone, look him/her in the eye and talk and share. It is what grounds me, what makes me remember the important stuff, the stuff that I am about.
So as I look toward 2021, I look forward to being together again. Eye contact. Touching. Holding. Hugging. I will be patient. I will wait. And when it is safe, I will drive, I will fly, I will gather.
