Yesterday evening when Tom got home from work I left to drive to Washington, D.C. for a two-day workshop at the National Science Foundation. It was painful to leave after so recently returning from vacation, but I knew Tom and Rowan would be fine without me. Erin and Ander came over to stay with Rowan today, and they'll come again tomorrow while Tom is at work. It's the 4-hour drive to D.C. that I want to write a bit about now.
I was about halfway through the drive when the sun went down. I was driving our car, a Mazda3 wagon with a manual transmission, a welcome change from the minivan. I reached Richmond, Virginia and my breath caught at the sight of the city skyline approaching in the distance against the black sky and the dark asphalt of the freeway with its bright white lines zooming past as I indulged my love for driving just a touch faster than the cars around me. As I was maneuvering through traffic, handling the curves in the freeway, taking in the cityscape, I had a vivid flashback to another nighttime cityscape drive I took a long time ago.
I was living in Atlanta, working on my master's at Georgia Tech, when Grampies was diagnosed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm that needed surgery. It was too specialized a surgery for the doctors in my small hometown, so Grampies and Grammies made a very speedy trip to Atlanta for surgery at Emory University Hospital. We all knew that my grandfather's condition was like a ticking timebomb that, if it ruptured, would kill him in a matter of seconds. He was already elderly by some people's standards, but his life was still filled with adventure: golfing, riding his bike, doing his best to aggravate my grandmother on a regular basis (which anyone who knows them would probably attest might have been the most hazardous sport in which he had ever indulged). I drove to Emory every day to visit his hospital room. Many times, I would drive home after dark, and the route took me straight down I-75 through downtown Atlanta. I vividly recall the sight: eight lanes of dark asphalt curving with the terrain, cars moving quickly with relief at the absence of rush hour congestion, and the looming glowing city skyline in view like stacks of jewels in the distance. On one of those solitary nighttime drives might have been the first moment I really felt my own mortality. I remember crying in the car when I thought that the grandfather I loved, the father my mother loved, and the husband my grandmother loved, was almost snatched away in a horrific and unexpected, even untimely, death. I acknowledged the possibility that I could be snatched away at any moment too, or perhaps, that it might feel like just tomorrow when I would be a ripe old age and maybe nobody would consider my death an untimely one.
This flashback, along with bringing up myriad bittersweet memories, served to invoke a strong feeling of gratitude. Perhaps the most obvious feelings of gratitude were the ones that came first: I felt thankful to be physically well. I marveled at the blessing of having a healthy, intelligent, loving, social child. I felt thrilled that in a small, unlikely town, I had found a man I fell in love with and who still treats me with kindness, a great sense of humor, and complete devotion. Then, I remembered how thankful I am that the beauty of eternity colors all things, whether exhilarating or heartbreaking. Even the most profound loss doesn't compare in magnitude to eternal, infinite Good.
And then it was time to exit the freeway.