Gratitude Practice 2017 Day #20: Parents...and “details”...

One of my cousins has recently posted what seems like hundreds of photos of my father's family on our Facebook family group. The majority, if not all of these photos are images I have never seen before… and many are of people I've never met. To say this old photo and slide converting, scanning and posting project has been a herculean effort would be an understatement...it's no small task and one I know we are all grateful for.

One photo of my parents sitting on a couch in my grandparents living room has kinda of stopped me in my tracks. Neither of my parents were big fans of being in front of the camera so we don't have very many images of them as individuals and even fewer of them together as a couple. While I don't have an actual date for this photo my keen detective work puts it sometime around 1969 making my parents around 27 years old. So much life lived before they sat in front of this painting and even more lived afterwards.

Seeing this image, one I had never seen before, has started me thinking about all of the other things I didn't know about them. Can children ever really know their parents as individual people and not somehow dependently connected? Not totally sure ...but it's certainly something to think about.

I'm 41 years old. When my parents were both 41 years old they had been married for 19 years and had six kids and too many jobs and homes and moves to count. When my parents were my current age my brother Russ was 18, my brother Spence was 16, my brother Nathan was 9, I was 7 and my little brother Sam was 3. My brother David, who died when he was two, would have been gone close to 14 years at this point in their lives. Comparison is normally the death nail when talking about families and especially parents but I can't help but think about how different my day to day world is from what their 41 year old life must have been.

I have a dear dear friend who speaks often about the “details” of life that each individual must navigate. It's the “details” that make things both oh so interesting and oh so sweet and all too often so so challenging. My parents, like all of us, had their fair share of “details” to figure out and to my dying day I know that a loving God can be found inside all of them. There are lots of theories about how certain kids are cosmically paired to certain parents...and beyond the genetic soup I believe there is something way bigger at play. For so many reasons ...both those known and so many unknown ...I'm grateful that I was a part of their “details” and that they are a part of mine.

This November marks 25 years since my father died and next January will be two years for my mom. A funny thing happens when both of your parents are gone and your family home has been resolved...these finale-like events unearth so so many of life's big “details” to navigate. In time, life returns to a new sense of normal but you do walk around the globe ...different. Changed. This time of year always makes me a little melancholy and a little reflective and so I write to figure things out. Grateful for the two perfectly imperfect 27 year olds sitting on this floral velvet couch. Grateful for all of the “details” that happened before and all of the “details” that happened afterwards and all of the “details” yet to come.