Mystery Keys and Piles of Ammo... The Surprising Journey of Grief

These last weeks have found us walking a wobbly path...

Grieving and Mourning often take hard turns, and to our surprise, during the heartache of losing Leroy's dad, we have had more than a few occasions to bubble up in hilarious laughter.   Is it only our family?!

Tears have spilled and visits to funeral homes have sat heavy, then... in the midst of family and shared meals and loud stories and babies messy, humor finds a crack and lightens our load.

Leroy's mom, Millie, made the decision to sell the family home within days of Don's passing.  It has been on her heart to do for ages... she is happy and content with their "apartment" in the nursing home and has no desire at all to move back home.  In typical Millie-fashion, she met her challenge head on, came to a decision and set her focus on the things that needed to get done.  And that list of things to get done was extensive to say the least...

Find an auctioneer for the estate.

Find a realtor for the house.

Begin the arduous task of sorting through years of precious keepsakes and other assorted oddities!

Yes, yes, many have asked, why have we waited so long to start cleaning and sorting thru the house?   Don and Millie have been in the nursing home for near a year...

It is true, but... here, reasonable logic bows to emotions deep and the heartbeat of love... Grandpa Don has struggled long and hard with letting go...   this has been their family home, for decades.  It is where family has gathered around to enjoy Thanksgiving Turkey and trimmings, celebrated Christmas joys, shared endless pots of coffee, said goodbye to loved ones, watched the babies play and grow up visiting Grandma and Grandpa, lived life, made memories... all within these four walls.

It is no less hard for us to pack up a lifetime of memories for them.   Even though the irony is not lost on us... Don no longer needs any of the treasures he stored and kept safe.  His treasure is safe in heaven.  How often we forget?  And hold on to meaningless treasure here on this side of Glory?  But that is perhaps a lesson for another day...

For these past days have been a blur of activity from dawn to long past dusk.

We have found an auctioneer... Love him to pieces already.  He gets the memories.  Knows these are family keepsakes.  He will be taking inventory of the house in the coming weeks for an auction later this fall.

And so, our friendly auctioneer gave us the job of removing all personal and private "treasures" from the house, unless we wanted them to go to auction, which, no, we don't... Enter an abundance of empty boxes and family worker-bees.

We ate donuts... made a plan... divided up... each took a room...

The Goal:  find and gather up all pictures, keepsakes and anything else Grandma might deem valuable (which meant bring it into the kitchen where Grandma sat comfortable and let her decide...this is where the plan de-railed regularly and the hilarious tripped us up often)

Within hours of implementing the plan, we realized the enormity of the task... The boxes could hardly contain the abundance of memories...

We started making piles in various rooms.

Old Photos and Pictures began to appear with alarming speed... in boxes and bags, found in dressers and desks, layered in frames and hidden in books.

 

 

Precious images, yellowed with age, a glimpse of our family from years long gone...

 

The genealogist in me just melted at this sudden connection to the past!

And of course, Grandma Millie reminisced with joy, hours flew by as we gathered to listen...

 

 

A favorite... Grandpa Don as a young man with his parents and sisters..

 

 

 

And Grandpa and Grandma courting...

 

Love...Love...Love these...

 

So easily distracted we were... but back to business... and we began to notice that there was loose change everywhere, along with keys that seemed to multiply like bunnies... in the china hutch, in cereal bowls, dumped in kitchen drawers and hanging from pegs in the utility room...

 

 

So many keys... we asked?  Grandma shrugged. 

 

One for the front door, one for the back... the car in the garage, the truck in the shop...

 

The others for doors long forgotten.  Important once, now a mystery, gathering dust in dark corners.  But we keep them anyway.  A story of our lives.  Keys to unlock gates along the journey... our homes, a diary, that first car, an office... keys to our heart... keys to our memory... keys that keep us safe... keys that bind us together... all marking the passage of time...

 

And the loose change?  It all went into the brown jug and those pennies and nickels and dimes filled fast, weighing heavy.  We all took bets, wrote our guesses down on slips of paper and at the bank we laughed at our lack of faith.   A grand total of $99.07.  Much more than our bravest guess... We stopped at the Steak n Shake to celebrate, Grandma ordering a Large Mocha Chocolate Shake.  It was the first time she had ever ordered a large...

 

The sorting continued as friends and family filtered in and out... Leroy and his brother found a stash of ammunition in a back bedroom and brought it out to add to the growing heaps scattered over the dining room table... later a sweet granddaughter rolled her eyes upon seeing the ammo and said only in our family would we have piles of photos, old keys and ammo mingled amongst the cookies and coffee...  We laughed, because, well, because, seriously, true... Who does that?

 

Ammo was safely stored, we polished off the cookies, smiled over coffee cups and knew somehow it would be alright...

Perhaps it is the gift Solomon offered in Ecclesiastes, his advice for this road we all travel...

"To everything there is a season,

A time for every purpose under heaven:

 

A time to be born,

And a time to die;

A time to plant,

And a time to pluck what is planted;

A time to kill,

And a time to heal;

A time to break down,

And a time to build up;

A time to weep,

And a time to laugh;

A time to mourn,

And a time to dance..."

                    Eccl. 3:1-4

 

 

Sometimes we found ourselves weeping and laughing in the same breath... Grandpa Don would have been amused.

Keys to unlocking this hard, hard journey of grief...

The laughing easier when we're together.

Grandma and the grandkids...

 

Grandma and the family...

 

Grandma and her boys...

 

She does not journey alone...

 

For in everything there is a season,

God giving and taking and holding us close...

 

The Gift of Tears, The Grace of Laughter,

It's where we are tonight...