Stay
Jordan Hoban | April 7, 2022
Special to The Echo | Jordan Hoban
Rev. Clifford R. Scott in his senior high school yearbook.
Losing a family member isn’t easy. Losing a family member while at school, doubly so. In my experience, the grieving process is a full-time job, taking as much from you as you have, and it works on its own time. You can’t rush it; you can’t force it; you can hardly predict it; but it’s there, working in the background.
Recently, I lost my grandfather after he suffered a brief battle with cancer. It was such a shock to see him deteriorate from the man I once knew. He was always strong, biblical, the old oak rooted in the center of the family grove. But I watched him become frail, quiet and afraid.
As his health declined, I periodically went down to Charlotte, NC, to visit him and my mother, who took on the role of his caregiver in his final months. Each time I saw him and saw how my mother worked with him, I felt the strongest pull to leave Warren Wilson, ready to help my family in whatever way I could. Ultimately, I decided the healthiest decision would be to continue visiting on weekends, trying my best to divide my attention between schoolwork and my personal life.
When I found out he had passed, I immediately went to be with family. The entire trip was a whirlwind of activity: writing my grandfather’s obituary, helping to plan his burial and sorting through all of his stuff to find his final wishes. It was so much activity that I didn’t have a chance to reflect on the sudden loss of my grandfather, and the important changes that it would eventually bring.
After I returned to school, I found that I was again thrown into a busy schedule. Relentless classes, work and deadlines. I was stricken with the realization that I may not have the chance to process what happened. It was difficult to stay in classes, to pay attention to teachers and to find importance in what felt trivial in the face of a momentous loss.
It feels like a near-olympian task, but the one word that has consistently come to mind is also the least impressive, the least immediate, and the least helpful: patience. Christian mystic Julian of Norwich believed that all the bad in the world would give way to an unstoppable goodness, typified in her now famous credo, “All shall be well.” The phrase implies a distant future filled with hope, a concept anyone raised Christian will understand as an integral part of the religion. Hidden in the gospel is a sense that the present is beyond help.
There’s a phrase that many healers use: “don’t push against the river.” If you’ve ever stood in the Swannanoa, then you’d immediately understand the phenomenon of being forced downstream. The only choice is to allow yourself to be carried with the current beyond the bend in the river, and who knows where you’ll end up. In the same way, the lack of immediate relief from grief will lead you somewhere you didn’t expect.
It’s cold comfort in the face of reality. However, by allowing yourself to listen to what you need in the moment you allow yourself to heal on your terms. And when I listen, no matter the noise or distraction, I hear the word “stay.”
