In search of Rivendell

"I'm old Gandalf, I know I don't look it, but I'm beginning to feel it in my heart. I feel thin ... sort of stretched, like ... butter scraped over too much bread. I need a holiday. A very long holiday."

These words express how I feel so completely accurately. You'd think that after nineteen months of intense grieving I would be on better footing somehow. As if the cancer journey and following it to the end of the line wasn't stretching enough ... the aftermath ... picking up all the shattered little pieces of broken dreams and aspirations has left me in this space of feeling so thin that you can probably see right through me, so thin that I should snap at any moment, so thin that I might disappear all together. And yet ... there is apparently something that keeps me out of that place of total snapping demise.

I've often wondered about J.R.R. Tolkien's life and if in Bilbo's character he expressed his own thinking. Perhaps he longed to escape to a place of beauty like Bilbo. Bilbo used the ring to disappear. If I had a magic ring, I would probably use it too. Bilbo went to Rivendell. I have longed to find a place of respite and protection amd beauty like what Bilbo found in Rivendell. In fact when I went to Italy about a year ago I secretly hoped I would find a little slice of paradise that I could grab on to and live in. I did find many such places. But I realized that I had a life to live at home with my children and others who have traveled a bit of this journey with me. So I returned to my life, one with many joys to beheld, but completely void of the friendship with my husband that had fueled me thru so many twists and turns of life's joys and hardships.

In the midst of the void, of continuing to long for what once was, I think the "something" that keeps me from total demise is hope. I have never liked this word because to me it always has represented the counterpoint ... disappointment. You hope for something, it doesn't come thru, you're disappointed. And so over the course of years I learned to stop hoping. But one day, several months before my husbands passing he said to me "Susanne, I need you to live in the space of hope with me" and so I did. I set aside what looked like certain demise and lived fully with my husband, we loved and lived and cherished what we had. We longed for and hoped for physical healing but with absolute confidence that outside the constraints of time and space there is ultimate healing.

For the sojourner left behind to grind it out, faced with, by far, the greatest disappointment of my life I have pondered and wandered and come round again ...

The hope that I have is rooted in heaven itself and confidence that there is a Master Planner. I have spent countless hours hashing it out with God. Asking all the tough questions; not having any answers. But the place that I keep coming back to is one of resting in a divine plan that is so much bigger than me, one that cannot be understood through the lens of human perspective. And so I find my Rivendell is a place of resting in the Divine's plan even though I cannot fathom it. And yes, I do feel like butter scraped over too much bread, but it serves as a reminder that in my weariness, exhaustion and feeling of thinness, something outside of me keeps moving me onward ...