If Mom and Dad were going to pass according to their personalities, they certainly did it. Mom with her slow pace, attention to detail, relationships that needed time, and her deep faith, which carried her. Dad with his 100-mile-an-hour personality, just-do-it-get-it-over-with style, bulldog determination, and his fierce independence. It really couldn’t be any more Mike and Martha, in the contradictory ways they left us.

For us, we are still stuck in the grief sandwich. Mom’s death came with a dull ache that lasted years. The agonizingly slow loss was our background pain for all of life. The throbbing, a constant, with each loss of recognition, of communication, of her person. Then Dad’s death, blew through like a tornado ripping our hearts wide open. A sharp sudden acute pain that still has us spinning. It couldn’t be any more opposite.

We dissected Mom’s life. With each downsize, we each took parts of her home with us. We displayed her on our shelves. We read her books. We wore her clothes, cooked her food, and prayed her prayers. All while she lingered. A slow passing of the matriarch baton. She waited for us to get more comfortable with the role. She smiled and giggled her way through the handoff. She waited until she was confident we had it in hand before she left us. I love her for that.

With Dad’s life, we are dissecting on a timeline. This time, every item has to go before one month is up. It is the final downsize. There is no time to linger. No time to slowly integrate his life into ours over time. It is now or never. Pondering and thinking through items to see if they fit isn’t an option. Take it or leave it. Now. Even grief is put on hold to some degree, as we shut down his apartment and his life. His hand-off was immediate. He trusted that we would and could do this. He documented his wishes and left us to it.

This final step of their parenting has left us as the parents now. It is an odd feeling to be a grown adult and feel lost, like a little girl. I am trying to find my footing, like when I first left home. Unsure. Insecure. Determined to make my own way and not have to return to the nest.

But this time, home left me. And that is a completely different, experience. I can’t change my mind and go back if I can’t figure things out. There is no home to go to. THEY were our home. It didn’t matter where they lived, wherever they were was where I belonged. As much as I don’t like it, we are orphans. Now, we are having to reconfigure our belonging.

My backbone and my glue are gone. I am undone. Breaking apart. Wandering. Untethered. Trying to find my place. What I have discovered along this sudden path, is that our family belongs to each other. Dad’s death, out of state, pulled us together in a new way. We had to depend on each other to get through the whole experience because we were in unfamiliar territory, both in reality and metaphorically. He handed us off to one another. He oversaw the hand off, personally. He had us all in the same room and he left us there, together.

Even in his last days, he was our secret provider. Giving us the space, we needed to make this monumental shift. Providing us with one another in our tears and grief. A bubble, away from our busy worlds, to sit with him and wait for our new assigned roles.

I can officially say this grief sandwich sucks. The push and pull of it, feels like there is no part of my heart that is not tender to the pain of one or the other…or both at the same time. Dull. Sharp. Overlaid, creating this complex pain I have never experienced before. I have been emotionally a wreck as well as physically sick and exhausted. Doing the best I can. However, once again, there is a storm of sorrow, but it is raining grace. Always grace. Breathing to get through each day, one day at a time.