The Dock

HEADING TO ATHENS, GEORGIA, for college was the first time I ever moved in my life. Now trust me, since then I’ve had enough addresses that it makes background checks complicated to list them all. But before college, my family had always lived on Ebenezer Road. I didn’t know any other home.

When my parents purchased their new property and planned to move, they called us all and planned one final family meal together at the house on Ebenezer Road. Their home, and my grandparents’ house across the driveway (with the cement porch perfect for snapping beans), was where every family meal and holiday had been celebrated for the last forty years at least. I have cousins who live all over the country and even in other countries, so when the ones who live in Asia were planning a summer trip home, we knew it was a good time to gather.

It was Edenish in the most heartbreaking ways. What I wanted most was to be at my grandparents’ house, for my grandfather to be grilling chicken and ribs, for the sound of the window units to fill the air, and for the grown-ups to be at one table and all the kids to be at another. I wanted to barely be worried about what was happening anywhere beyond those eighteen acres. I wanted to have a book tucked under my leg at the dinner table, probably a Garfield comic book, just hoping for a chance to sneak away and read. I wanted my grandmother to be laughing in the chair at the end of the grown-up table in the dining room, legs and arms crossed, her pants and her top the same color.

And we were so close. SO CLOSE to that. My parents and uncle were there and in great health, but my grandparents were gone, and their house wasn’t ours to use anymore. Dad was incredibly good at grilling and his burgers were unmatched, but the outside grill where my grandfather cooked the meat, a rectangle of cement and stone, was broken down and full of leaves and debris and hadn’t been used in decades. The kids at the kids table were now the adults at the second table. We were all grown, and there were so many worries outside the property that there was no magic way to leave them sitting at the end of the driveway. I felt a certain depth to this meal, knowing it would be our last with everyone on Ebenezer Road.

We did that thing where we all stood on the porch for a picture in the same spots we had always stood so that we could mark growth and change over the decades of taking the same cousin picture. We caught up and laughed and spent the afternoon helping Mom and Dad with the food, cleaning up the kitchen afterward, watching a baseball game on television, and talking. We were always talking. As the sun set and the blue darkness of a July summer sky took over, it was my time to shine.

I had made a decision on the way down from Nashville, my Toyota RAV4 driving that well-worn path between Music City and Atlanta—I-24 East to I-75 South. I would not stop anyone (myself included) from feeling sadness or pain about the loss of this house and this property, and I would do my part to make the whole thing fun. To me, making strong fun memories are some of the best ways to partner with the pain you feel and give it purpose. Fun is never meant to replace pain, or better said, fun will never replace pain. But fun can walk alongside it. You can hold them both and see what happens when they dance together.

My mom used to say that I was a thermostat for our family and it made me feel massive pressure, like I would never live up to controlling all the emotions in everyone. If I was in a bad mood, I just wanted to be in a bad mood and not have it affect everyone else. But that’s not real life for the way God made me. It took me until my late twenties to find the joy and purpose in that role in the family, but once I got more emotionally healthy as Annie, I got more emotionally healthy in my role in our family system. (I am a lot of other things in our family, too, but I do recognize the spot I have is the gift of helping us see things in a different way; therefore, I often bring a new perspective and an added helping of joy.)

So about an hour into my three-and-a-half-hour drive, I pulled off the interstate before reaching Chattanooga. There was a massive warehouse just off the exit with huge red letters painted on the side that spelled FIREWORKS. I had never been in that warehouse before, but I knew that drive was the perfect time to stop.

I walked in and pretty much just said, “Give me one of each.” Just kidding. I’m not rich and my RAV4 doesn’t have that much trunk space. But I did buy far more fireworks than we needed. I got a few packs that made me laugh—a bunch that were named after presidents of the United States, some random ones that just looked fun and colorful, and then a bunch of the long tubes that you hold while multiple fireworks burst out of the end. (I think they are called Roman candles.) I got ten of those. One for each adult cousin and cousin spouse in our family, and then one extra just for fun. I also got sparklers because those seem like the exact right thing to have on hand at all times. (So says the girl who keeps a drawer full of confetti poppers at her office AND her house.) Once the back of my car was filled absolutely to the brim with entertaining explosives, I got back on the road and continued my drive.

After dinner that night on Ebenezer Road, when all was cleaned and the sun had set, all the grown-up kids headed down to the dock at the pond. The pond isn’t large; it’s maybe an acre total, and it was manmade back in the farm days of the land. The wooden dock has about a fifteen-foot walkway from the edge of the pond out to a platform. I’m not sure the exact measurements of it, but I can tell you it is nine adult cousins wide, because we all stood shoulder to shoulder to shoot off fireworks.

We started with the ones that we set down and lit the fuse and ran away from. As they exploded into the sky and reflected on the still water of the pond, they were beautiful and hilarious and no one was injured in the lighting of an entire savings account worth of fireworks. We had our own show, and it was glorious. Then the Roman candles were all that were left. We each lit one and stood in a straight line and let them explode over the water, watching them burst from each of our cardboard tubes. And while I didn’t cry, I felt it deeply. I felt the joy of the moment and the absolute beauty of the experience, but I also felt the loss. There’s a version of Annie that would have required me to pick one—either love it or lose it—but the more God has formed me and transformed me, the more I have room for both.

I’M NOT A PROFESSIONAL at grief. I’m not actually a professional at fun either, though I do feel like I’ve put enough practice and hours to get some sort of credit for what I know about it. Finding fun in the midst of grief is one of the things at which I always want to be an amateur.

Finding fun, making memories, bringing a smile to a situation that is full of sadness and pain—these are all things I want to engage in for pleasure and things I feel devoted to. I refuse to force grief to be a quick experience. Back in Bible times, it was customary to grieve for a week after someone died. Like when Lazarus died in John 11, Mary’s friends were sitting around weeping with her for four days after her brother had passed. Then when she suddenly jumped up to go find Jesus on the road to Bethany, they all followed, still full of sadness, thinking she was going to her brother’s tomb. They were still weeping after FOUR WHOLE DAYS.

We’ve shortened the grieving process these days, but real, true, deep grieving lasts much longer than the amount of time we’re given to be sad. Nowadays you have less than a week to grieve before life moves on, the internet moves on, your friends move on. Of course you will be sad, but we’d like you to keep that to yourself and only your very best friends, please. We have moved on.

(I think we are doing that wrong, by the way. We should notice each other’s grief and choose to acknowledge when others are suffering and slow down enough to let each other feel sad as long as we need to. But that’s another book for another time.)

I’m no professional at grieving, but honestly none of us are. We are all amateurs at loving and losing, because each circumstance and situation is different. Every relationship that ends is different from the one before. Every friendship that falls apart pings unique spots of pain. When a person dies whom you have known and loved, the loss is unlike any other loss you’ve experienced.

In a way that people cannot see, there is a unique grief to losing dreams that will never be fulfilled or jobs that you weren’t hired to do or homes that are no longer yours. There are losses that no one else sees, grieving that is so deeply private, that while the rest of your life could look right in space and place, you know profoundly that Eden is lost.

This is true for everyone. Every one of us. While we are all amateurs, we are not that different than our neighbor or friend or family member or archnemesis. We are all very new to grief and pain, every time, and we all know it.

But we also know the release of a laugh and the freedom of a smile in a heartbreaking moment. We know that there can be joy in grief. That’s the magic trick here; that’s the piece you have to search for and find and give to your people. Every time you provide a smile amid tears, every time you get cookies delivered to a teenager at the hospital just because you know she loves warm cookies, every time you think of that one little fun thing that may make someone else’s day better, the people you are serving with your fun are getting a glimpse at Eden, and so are you.

I TEXTED MY COUSIN TODAY to ask him the name of that particular firework, the Roman candle, because all the ways I tried to google it based on what I remembered about how they work led me down some weird paths. My cousin lives in a part of Asia where the time difference is twelve hours from Nashville. I never calculate well, so I just kinda go for it and text him when he comes to mind and hope and pray I don’t wake the poor kid up with some stupid meme I INSIST on sending at that exact moment. (I am the oldest in our family, so in some respects, I am allowed to be the most annoying. I embrace THAT role in our family system with much gusto.) I was surprised when he texted me the answer almost immediately, and then he asked, “Gathering fireworks for Thanksgiving this year?” I laughed. But it spoke something to me too.

It reminded me that my amateur move of buying a bunch of fireworks just to help us remember a special night for our family stuck with all of them too.