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How to have a truly happy new year.

For the first time in years, I don’t remember my New Year’s resolution from January. Usually, I write it down in my journal or on a note I stick to my mirror. There’s been many of those dog-eared sticky notes from years past. The year of contentment. Speaking life. We passed pancakes across the breakfast table on January 1st this year. “What do you want from 2018?” I can’t remember my answer. I know what I didn’t want though. I didn’t want to walk into her office and share the parts of my life I’m inclined to hide. I didn’t want to Facetime her the day after she delivered her baby that never breathed. I didn’t want to spend four months wondering how I’d walk into her house on Christmas day and see her empty chair. I didn’t want to go on another first date that led nowhere. We sit across from each other in a little coffee shop in Colorado, picking at a charcuterie board. “When I think about all of the things I have left to go through,” her voice cracks....
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Hope When She's Gone

It's fall reading break. While the rest of my classmates take the train back to the city or carpool to their one-intersection country towns, I travel the familiar back-roads to the farm. It's when I first step out of the car, the vacancy moves icily from the lump in my throat to below my ribs somewhere.

I trace the scattered clues. Tufts of black hair from her smooth coat scattered in the grass. The dirt scratched, scarring the grass, and leaving bald spots beside the veranda steps at every corner. The lily stalks flattened in the flowerbed, from where her warm body used to hide until mom scolded her out again. No dog, wagging her tail, to greet me.

Where's the dog who was Waldo in the background of every outdoor childhood photo? Where's the dog who followed me every time I ran away behind the pine trees and cried? Where's the dog who kept me company on the first night I ever stayed at home alone? 

I know. She's at the edge of the bush underneath three feet of dirt. No grave marker yet. Another piece of my childhood faded into pictures only. 

Mom wraps her arms around me and I hide red eyes in her hair while she says, "Death is such a horrible thing. I just keep thinking that this isn't how God intended the world to be." I nod. Why didn't humans trust that God had the best plan in the beginning? No pain, no suffering, no graves. Beneath the ache of losing her, fourteen years of growing up together, I remember that God still has the best plan. 

One day, on streets of gold, behind pearly gates, I'll see it fully.

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