Personally...

My mom's mom is back at her apartment. She's out of the hospital and my mother is spending the night with her in case something else happens. A lot for my mom to handle.

In October of 2009, my parents called my phone and left me a hilarious voicemail which I saved and still listen to every now and then. I called home to tell them someone was engaged, meaning for it to be a surprise that my cousin's boyfriend had finally proposed to her at the Marine Corps Memorial in DC. My parents missed the part about it being my cousin's engagement, and thought I was going to tell them I got engaged. Needless to say, I got a voicemail from Mom and Dad that sounded thrilled and panicked at the same time, yet still completely hysterical in their rush to understand my non-existent engagement. I kept this voicemail because a week later, Nana had a massive stroke and my parents went to Minnesota to clean out her cabin and bring her home to Virginia to live. I don't remember my parents sounding like their happy, joking selves since that voicemail, and don't anticipate hearing that side of them again for a long time.

And I can't sleep. I have to pick up Rose tomorrow morning so I should be in bed before midnight, but its already 12:23 am and I'm still awake. I drifted off earlier, but I had a bad dream.

Through it all, Jesus has been my friend. I have held His hand when I have no idea what on Earth I'm doing, why I'm feeling the way I do, or what direction my life is heading. There are times when I relish the thought of not knowing; its suspenseful and liberating and I feel like I'm on the threshold of discovering the most marvelous secret. Sometimes I want nothing more than to get out of the city and be in the middle of nowhere and no one knows who I am. I could wait tables, live out of my car, be single and have nothing left to lose. There are other days I long for consistency. Consistency of what; I couldn't exactly answer that, I just know I could live mindless and redundantly sometimes and not complain.

This has all been a strange year. Matthew dies, Nana moves here, Ginny marries, I graduate and move to DC. Life is crazy, but in all the crazy, there is a strange comfort knowing both that things will be better and the people with whom you're going through it all are, at the end of the day, still family. And where there is family, though it may not always be obvious, there is love.