Originally published November 2018.

I stepped into the entryway at the RDU Airport this morning, and a rush of memories immediately flooded back through my mind and body.

The three times I had to force-feed myself fish rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on our flight to China that went on for an eternity, and I was sure it would be the end of me. Pooping in my first squatty potty in the Guangzhou airport. The tears that did a slow dive down my cheeks when we flew over the New Zealand mountains for the first time. Wearing the most fashionably horrendous combination of patterns in the Kuala Lumpur airport on another layover and making my bed under a stairwell for the night. Getting bombarded by what seemed like 542 taxi drivers who surrounded us like seaguls fighting over a sardine, screaming TAXI? TAXI? TAXI? Over and over at 3am upon our arrival in Bali, completely jetlagged and lacking the grace to say no thank you 5000 times while we waited on our ride to our hotel.

The taxi driver that drove us from the Laos airport who didn’t know much English besides telling us to make sure we got tipsy on lots of BeerLao, with a big smile on his face and wide eyes.

Always having to figure out how much money we needed with the new exchange rate, and breaking our Thailand training to not to say Kop Khun Ka in Nepal when we wanted to say thank you to the scary Katmandu customs workers. The excitement of being able to facetime my family, Peter, or Julia during layovers because wifi was normally semi-okay to at least talk for a couple minutes, and the intense homesickness I would feel after hanging up. All of the peoplewatching, all of the bad airport food, all of the listening to the Ben Howard album, AGAIN, because I had listened to all of my music so many times through. Sprinting through the Istanbul Airport to make my connecting flight back to the States. And then the last time I was at an airport, stepping foot in Hartsfield International Atlanta, and wanting to fall to my knees and kiss the dirty freaking ground because I was finally home.

Today is different though.

Not so exciting, not so fun, not so filled with adventure, but a lot more real, a lot more raw, a lot more human. Today I’m hopping on a flight from Raleigh to Atlanta last minute to go home to attend the funeral of Mary Ann Jones, my great aunt who passed away Monday morning. Today I fly holding tears in my eyes, but they are made not of joy, but of grief.

But that’s a real part of airports though, especially at the holidays. They’re not just filled with the buzz of adventures and trips and excitement. They are also filled with the heaviness and confusion of grief, of flying home to attend a funeral, or flying across the country to be with your father who had a massive heart attack like a friend of mine last week, or flying home for Thanksgiving next week, or maybe knowing that someone who has always been there will never fill their spot at the dinner table again, and their absence will feel like too much to bear.

Sitting here thinking about how different it feels to be traveling because of something tragic makes me wonder how many people I have walked by in the dozens of long airport hallways I have walked down, hurried and unaware of the possible tears falling from the cheeks of those around me, with their heads down, as I am today.

It makes me wonder how many people I have walked past outside of airports as well. At the grocery store. At the gym. People are losing people they love all the time, and even though we can’t always notice, I think it is important to remind ourselves to stop and take a second to remember that we are constantly colliding through chaotic outcomes that are out of our control, and it’s really important to smile at strangers when you walk past them on the street, because good Lord we all know we need to be reminded to look up out of our own stuff we carry around and just look into the eyes of another human and smile.

Aunt Mary Ann was the matriarch of my mom’s side of the family,

the sister of my mom’s dad, John, who I never met because he passed away before I was born. I did not have a deep or consistent one on one relationship with her outside of seeing her a couple times a year at family gatherings, but Aunt Mary Ann embodied a symbol of family that was an inspiration to me, and she always made it known that she loved you and always had you in her thoughts and prayers.

This side of the family is like a large oak tree, with many intertwining branches, many connected branches, many complicated branches, missing branches of significant people we have lost in tragedy and disease, and a few broken branches of relationships that have not been fully healed, and Aunt Mary Ann, or Maw Maw as most of us called her, was the trunk that always held everyone together and connected all of our complicated stories and reminded us of the importance of family, taking whatever bit of family you have been given, and thanking God for the gift that it is.

In our family, everyone is cousin, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, even if you can’t quite remember how you are actually related, and even if they are not blood. I saw Jesus reflected in Maw Maw this way. Every Christmas, and every Easter, all of the various branches would come in their glory and mess and rowdiness from all areas of the South and pile into Aunt Mary Ann’s living room.

The dads and grandpas and boys who were too cool to play with the younger kids anymore would be in the sun room watching some sports game, the moms and grandmas and pre-teen girls trying to find their feminity in a family of almost all boys would be in the living room catching up and gasping at how old everyone was getting, the kids would be outside playing football, or collecting pecans from the giant pecan trees out front, probably arguing over whether you pronounce it peh-cahn or pee-can, or playing with the newest puppy someone brought, or throwing sticks in the lake out back. The kitchen table was small, so our potluck dinner options, mostly the yellow and brown shades of southern comfort food, would always be spread out to every flat surface we could find, and the desserts (almost as high in quantity as the dinner foods) were always laid out on top of Maw Maw’s giant freezer in the back room, and I normally ended dinner time with a stomach ache.

The house would be a mess, the kids would spill things everywhere, babies were always crying and needing attention, the dogs probably would pee on something, mud would be on the carpet from when we ran inside after playing football in the yard with our shoes still on, but Maw Maw never cared. She was always there, never in the spotlight, but always smiling her big smile beaming perfect white teeth and the joy of having all of her people scattered about on her land and in her home. She was always serving, always joyful, always loving.

She is a reminder of what it means to love selflessly,

and she is a reminder of the importance of showing up to what family you have been given, of opening up your home, of inviting all to the table. I hope that we all would enter into and take part in carrying on her legacy as our family continues to morph and change, knowing that even though we will continue to lose branches as time goes on, their death is taken into the ground to send nutrients back into our roots, and we will always carry them with us as we continue to grow, the passing of old being met with the addition of the sweet new branches of new birth and new life.

Before I started writing this, I thought I had processed through Mary Ann’s passing this week. I thought I had done what grieving I needed, and honestly before now it seemed minimal. But I am realizing that until writing this I have not actually taken time to slow down and just remember. I am reminded, through my now tear-stained shirt and reflecting on my experience of her and asking myself who she meant to me when she was still fully Maw Maw, before the dementia started taking over, of the importance of remembering. Remembering for ourselves, and helping others remember by telling stories when they can’t seem to find the energy to look past their grief, especially those in our family that were primary caretakers of Maw Maw as her dementia progressed.

When we lose people we love, knowing how to grieve and remember is sometimes confusing. Do you just feel sad? Do you just lament? Do you only celebrate? Do you tell stories? Do you do some sort of embodied ritual or ceremony to help your body move through the grief? Do you eat? Do you fast? I don’t know if there is one answer. I think if there is an answer, it would be closer to all of those things, and especially the act of remembering. Remembering memories of trips taken that change our lives, and also remembering the true reality of those people in our lives that show us a special individual slice of love, of family, of God, and doing our best to carry their Spirits with us as we go forth.

Take time to remember and really sit with the importance of what someone means to you this week. We need every reminder we can get that we are not alone in this heart-wrenching beautiful task of figuring out how to be human in this world.

Cheers to the Journey, and may your Spirit always reside in a state of wonder.