Spring 2010

Up until now, this has been a travel blog. It stresses me out to think about keeping an up-to-date “real life” blog, but it has been such an eventful year that I thought that writing an entry each season would be a good journal of sorts for me. So here goes…

Spring 2010

Spring was a season of loss. Three significant losses in my life, as well as losses in the lives of people close to me made it sometimes feel like the world was crashing down around me. But God is sovereign and I trust in the One that is unchanging.

It started in March when my roommate met the man who is now her fiancee. She has always been someone to jump into new things with both feet and great enthusiasm, and this relationship even more so. It consumed all her time, and I felt abandoned. If she wasn’t with him, she was on the phone with him or writing in her “love journal” and was suddenly too busy for me. My feelings of hurt and jealousy, compounded by my initial mistrust of strangers prevented me from warmly welcoming this new person, which only widened the gap between my roommate and I. I cried every night and even went to a counselor (ok, only once, but I did go!) I am still greiving the loss of our friendship, and working to forgive her, but I have moved on and discovered that yes, I can live without her. Life has lost a bit of its fun and sponteinity with the loss of the person I shared every day with for five years, but I have also discoved that God tends to bring new friendships when other relationships die. Oddly enough, he brought me a friend by the same name around the same time, and I have spent countless hours with her and her kids.

On April 7 I received a call from my dad that my cousin Hans died after falling from a four-story building while installing a solar panel that morning at work. I screamed “no!” and sobbed for hours, just calling out his name, with two bewildered dogs on my lap. My precious cousin Hans, only 30 years old, with white blond hair, skinny runners’ legs, a dimpled smile which lit up a room, and the ability to become so absorbed in a conversation with you that he would forget all else. Beautiful Hans. The image of his broken body haunts me. He had been living in California for the past few years, and missed several of our annual family reunions, so I hadn’t seen him in a while. He and his brother Carl visited me in Tanzania in 2002, and I treasure that special time we had together, hours of talking and laughing and visiting amazing places like Zanzibar. I flew down to Berkely for his funeral that weekend and was overwhelmed at the outpouring of love from his friends and community there. Family flew in from Alaska, Washington, Montana, and Indiana. The hardest moment was seeing his casket loaded into the hearse at the end of the service. Every family gathering is different now, with the hole he leaves, and I miss him very much. Yet a smile does cross my face when I imagine him chillin’ with Farmor (grandmother) in Heaven!

The third loss was also in my household. I met Eric, along with his wife Beth, and daughter Anya, the summer of 2001 in Chicago, where we were all in training for our upcoming time of service in Tanzania. I about fell off my chair when we were all introducing ourselves and he said he came from Bellevue, WA! I quickly connected with them and we became fast friends. They lived about nine hours by bus away from me in Tanzania, yet I was able to see them about once every three months because they lived just an hour away from my family there. I returned to the States before them, and Beth let me know that they had a house in Bellevue and they were looking for renters. I assured her that there was no way I was going to live in Bellevue again, but thanks anyway. About four months later I emailed her asking about details of the house when I interviewed for a Young Life position back in my hometown of Bellevue! It was perfect and I have lived there for 6 ½ years, 5 ½ of them with Eric, Beth and Anya upstairs. We are family now. We share a Tanzanian experience, a Norwegian heritage, and a love of Christian community and living life together. My dad’s cousin was even Eric’s Sunday School teacher back in California!

For 3 ½ years Eric battled brain cancer. Although he didn’t pass away until August 30th, I am including his loss here because he began his final decline in the spring. Each week he lost more mobility, and by summer he was in a hospital bed in the living room. Starting in the spring, there were almost always houseguests upstairs. Eric’s parents from California stayed for weeks at a time, and there were frequent visits from his sisters, Eric’s friends from work, church, and college. He spent his last few days at Evergreen Hospital’s hospice center, where we thought he would just stay briefly while they adjusted his anxiety meds. He died on a Monday, Anya’s first day of 5th grade. I visited Eric shortly after she had left hospice for school. She had written “I love you Dad” on his arm. His breathing was heavy and raspy and he was not conscious. I said my goodbye, although I didn’t really realize at the time that it was the last time I would see him here on earth. He died late that afternoon, while his friend Alex was reading a poem aloud called Roy Gardner called The Promise: “We have the promise of life eternal, a paradise in the sky, a place of God’s presence, we will not sorrow, pain, or cry…”