Today I went to Dearman's Diner and had a fantastic cheeseburger, all dressed, and an even more fantastic chocolate milkshake. I ate mounds of sweet potato fries. I sat at a table with ten middle school girls who have all become so much to me throughout these long summer days. We were there to say goodbye to one another, they to me and I to them. We sat in red vinyl chairs, sipped our milkshakes, and shared our memories. A piece of me, maybe the piece sipping on chocolate milkshake but I think something deeper down, shriveled up and died.
I saw a cicada shell clinging to a tree the other day, brown and crisp with a great crack down the center. A friend wrote to me in a letter about when we are lifted from our earthly bodies and carried to the paradise of God -- like a cicada separated from its lifeless shell and lifted away on new alive wings.
Sometimes I say that I like change. And I do. But I've realized the kind of change I have spent my entire life hating is the separating kind. Goodbyes are my greatest untalent. (Sergei can testify.) When I say goodbye to Baton Rouge -- to Sarah Beth, and Sophie, Christina and Christine, Elise (who I watched discover Christ), Madison, Carolyn, and Anna Catherine (with her perpetual shy smile) -- when I say goodbye, something in me closes off again. The fearful part, the part afraid of hurting or dying again. The part that dreads separation.
Have I left pieces of my shell on trees in cities all over the country?
I can't help but think, when at last I am lifted from my earthly body in that final separation, will I be sad to let the earth go? Do I hold on too tightly?
And yet. On that day, when my shell is left clinging to the old world and my soul soars to the new, won't all of the separations that gave my soul small deaths in the old world become the uniting that resurrects my soul in the new? Face-to-face with all the lives that have brushed mine, that I've been so blessed as to brush up against, with friends who fell asleep long ago, with family I never knew, with those whose written words charged and changed me, with old loved ones, in short, with that great cloud of witnesses; face-to-face -- at last, at long long last -- with the Great Lover who Saved me, will I not believe with the faith of all things that all separation is resurrected into union?
Those days (if they can be called "days" when no time can determine their beginning or end) will make today seem like a brief farewell before the long and joyful embrace.
Postscript: Come to think of it, now that I'm all packed with my bags and suitcases piled around me: in less than a week, I'll be reunited at college with some of my best friends in the world. And with my love. :) I'll turn from sadness and look forward to those long, joyful embraces.
