This wasn't how I anticipated getting my blog up and going, but a little over a week ago, my dad passed away. He was battling stage IV colon cancer, and after a two and a half year battle, he finally went home to be with my brother, Bruce, and the Lord. The months and years ahead will be difficult ones without him, and yet I know, at least cognitively, that the Lord will give me the strength I need to get through this. He will be my peace when I have none; he will be my strength when I am weak. 

I gave the eulogy at my dad's funeral, in the form of a letter to him: 

Dad, I've never found it difficult to write, but today I do. It's challenging to write a summation of your life, for there was so much you did and so much more you desired to do--and yet, the Lord's timing was perfect, even in this. On November 25, 2017, you took your last breath and passed into eternity with your Lord and Savior. You fought hard, just as I would expect you to--after all, you were the one who taught us to never give up. You were stubborn until the very end, even when we told you it was okay, that you could go home, you held on, and more importantly, you let us hold you. 

Before you were a father to Bruce, Julia, and myself, and a husband to Mom, you were a son, a brother, and a friend. You loved your mom and dad deeply, and although I've heard rumors that you were at times a mischievous brother, your love for your sisters was undeniable. You were a true friend to many, always taking the time to ask how someone was doing, and doing so with sincerity. 

Over the last several years, I watched as your love for Mom grew in ways that I never knew it could. I saw you look adoringly into her eyes, and tell her you loved her with fierce devotion. She told us, after you passed away, that you made her promise she wouldn't remarry (I can't say we were surprised)--and you told her just a few nights before you passed that you thought it was very unfair that you couldn't be married to her in heaven. In fact, you found it so unfair that you told her you'd just sneak around up there. 

You had a wry sense of humor, which was evident when you dubbed yourself "Chemosabe," during your many chemo treatments or when you let several rats loose at your high school graduation, and literally took the secret to your grave. As Fyodor Dostoevsky said, "If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don't bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he's a good man." 

You could make others laugh so hard it hurt, and you laughed so well. You were a good man; you were the best of them. 

Daddy, you fought hard to beat this cancer, and truthfully, I thought you would--I thought God would cure you, that there would be a miracle. But, I'm beginning to realize that the life you lived for the last two and a half years was  a miracle. You were able to travel to far away places, you were able to enjoy meals at some of the best restaurants in the world, and most importantly, you were able to spend time with us, your family. This was a miracle, because we never had to watch you become half of the man you were, you were always, so truly, you. 

I know you would want us to be happy, and we will be, eventually. Mom, Julia, and I have each other, and we have the strength and peace of the Lord--and we have a promise that we'll see you again soon. 

And, as I know you'd like us all to remember, in the great words of Monty Python, "Always look on the bright side of life." 

Bruce A. Miller, Jr. 

November 17, 1961-November 25, 2017

It’s difficult for me to believe that it’s been ten years since Bruce passed; ten whole years that I’ve lived without him in my life. It’s a nuanced agony to imagine what life would have been like with him here. I wonder, what would he be doing? Would he be married? Who would he be married to? Would they have children? Would we still be best friends? Would my life be different? Of course, these questions aren’t important, at least not really, because this is how life has unfolded and where I am today, who I am today, is because of these moments and the way the Lord has strengthened and held me through them.

Before Bruce went away to military school we started getting close. I kept his secrets and he protected me from the myriad of terrible guys that I was interested in. I was young, fifteen years old, and although I probably shouldn’t have kept his secrets for him, at that time, I thought I was doing the right thing. A few weeks ago, I was at my parents’ house and I came across a journal of my dad’s—he had planned on writing us a book with a profusion of advice that we could look back on when he was gone. In this journal, I found a list of the things he wanted to address, one of which included his greatest regret in life, which was that Bruce died. Next to this proclamation, he wrote that he wondered what he could have done differently to prevent it.

The truth is, we all could have done things differently. I could have shared more with my parents about what was going on with Bruce and perhaps he would have ended up in rehab sooner. Or maybe if my parents wouldn’t have been so strict, he wouldn’t have rebelled as much as he did. But, the what ifs can’t bring Bruce back and they can’t show me what would have been, like some mystical crystal ball. Decisions are like a game of Chutes & Ladders, each decision leading us to a consequence (whether good or bad) and ultimately to another decision. Our path isn’t linear, and although I wish it was as simple as uttering “if only I had done this, then,” it’s a lot more complicated than that.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t wonder what Bruce would be like as an almost thirty-year old. It doesn’t mean I don’t wish that he could be here to walk Julia down the aisle in Dad’s absence. It doesn’t mean that I don’t wonder if perhaps Dad would still be here if Bruce hadn’t died. And yet, I can’t live, nor do I want to live, in a world where I’m constantly wondering what if. This isn’t to say that I haven’t had doubts or that I never contemplate what could have been, but I’ve chosen to feel God’s peace in the midst of these questions.

As strange as this sounds, in some ways I’m thankful for the ten-year anniversary of Bruce’s death, because it reminds me that I can trust that someday I will look back and see God’s hand in the absence of my dad as well. He provides, even in the midst of the darkest of days, and there is a purpose to this pain. I don’t think I would be the woman I am today without the loss of Bruce, and several years from now I hope I’ll look back and see that I couldn’t possibly be the woman I am then without having lost my dad.

I still wonder what grand purpose Bruce’s death served, because even ten years later it’s unclear. I wonder what purpose my broken engagement served—although I’ve begun to see God’s hand very clearly in this. And, I wonder why Dad had to leave us when he did. But, there is beauty in the unknown; there is peace that transcends the broken places; there is hope in the depths of darkness.

Two weeks ago, if you had asked me what my plan for my life was, I would have given you a very well-thought-out five-year-plan—one that would have concluded with the penultimate career achievement of becoming a head of school at the age of thirty-two. It seemed like the logical step in my career, and being the organized and rational person I am, I had convinced myself that climbing this corporate education ladder was what I should do.

My five-year-plan certainly didn’t include being twenty-seven, jobless, and moving home—and yet, here I am.

Let me back up a little. About a month ago, I moved to Arizona to begin a new job as dean of students. Before I accepted the position, I asked my mom if it was okay for me to move so far away, with the promise that it would only be for two years at most. She conceded that she would be fine with me going and that she was excited for me to take this step in my career. So, I sold my furniture, shipped my car, and bought a one-way ticket to Phoenix.

I got moved in, started my new job, and began to assimilate to what Arizonans refer to as “dry heat”—as if that makes 115 degrees Fahrenheit any more bearable. But, having one daughter 1,400 miles away in North Dakota, and the other 2,300 miles away in Arizona was proving to be much more difficult than my mom or I had anticipated.

I talked on the phone with my mom nearly every day, and most of the time she was great. But, night time, as I’m sure you can imagine, was when it got hard; when the emotion would set in; when the grief felt most pertinent and pressing, making it hard to breathe. Sometimes in these moments she would call and I was thankful for that, but it was hard to hear her hurting, knowing I couldn’t be there.

Before I left for Arizona, I stumbled upon one of my dad’s notebooks. In this specific notebook there was a list of things he wanted to write about for Julia and me—answers to questions we might have or advice he wanted to give us. In between relationship advice and how to raise your children, the notebook read, “take care of Mom.” As I listened to my mom on the phone and did my best to comfort her, I remembered that line, and I knew.

Several days later, I asked my mom if she wanted me to move home. The stoic she is, she of course said no, and reassured me that it was fine that I lived across the country. I responded by telling her that it was okay to ask for help sometimes—that sometimes strength means saying you can’t do something on your own. She said she would think and pray about it, and after a few short days, she told me she wanted me home.

That Monday, I spoke with my head of school to let her know that I needed to move back home to be with my mom—she seemed supportive and understanding and thanked me for letting her know ahead of time. And, by what seemed like fate, the head of a sister school in New York City happened to be the head of school from my first teaching job. It seemed like God was orchestrating everything perfectly.

And then the interview came, and I was asked if I thought I could be a good teacher after having experienced the loss of my dad. In the moment, I didn’t know how to respond to being asked such a pointed question, and I nearly cried right there on the phone. Somehow I finished the interview, but when I hung up, I knew I didn’t get the job, but I also knew that God was still calling me home.

It was easy for me to trust God when everything seemed to be going according to plan, according to my plan. And that’s where the issue lied, it was all going according to my plan, not His.

The Lord was quietly redirecting my path—he had been nudging me for a while, but I was too afraid to listen, too scared to step into the unknown, too prideful to heed God’s prodding. So, I let go of the fear, the anxiety, the pride, and I decided to trust.

I’ve been home for two days now and while I still have moments of anxiety, for the first time, in a long time, I feel free. I still don’t have a job, but I no longer feel shackled to my resume or a career. I still don’t know what God’s plan is, but I see him creating paths in places I never thought to look.

Yes, it’s scary to trust in something you cannot see; it’s anxiety inducing to put your hope in something that might never come to fruition, but that’s what faith is—that’s where freedom lies.

So, I may be twenty-seven, jobless, and living at home. But, I am untethered, and my soul is wild, and I’m excited to see where all of this (whatever this is) goes.

The last month has felt insufferable and I’ve hurt in ways I didn’t think I could hurt anymore. And I’ve wanted to run away from this pain so many times in the past weeks, and yet, I keep being reminded to be still, to sit with it—to let it pour over me, to wait.

To be still in the hurt, so I can soften. To let this pain wash over me and wait in this season of deciduousness, so I can grow—so I can become.

I’ve realized as I’ve processed that I want to run because I’m afraid. I’m profoundly scared that no one will be able to love me in the ways I need or desire—that no one will be willing to go to the hard places with me, and that I won’t find someone who can stand with me even when it’s really hard.

So much of me wants to “protect” my heart in the midst of this pain, but I also have a deep longing for my heart to remain open and patulous to all the beautiful and harrowing moments of what could be.

If I close my heart because I’m afraid of being wounded, I’m also disallowing the possibility of experiencing a sepulchral joy, a gaping love, a cavernous knowing.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t terrified of what leaving my heart susceptible might mean. I wonder how much more loss my heart can take, how many more times I can give all of myself to have it returned-to-sender.

And yet, I think I’d rather give all of myself and love with all of my heart, even if it comes at the expense of being destroyed. Because, this is the heart God has given me, this is the person he made me to be, and being anything other than this feels like a betrayal of myself.

So, today I am bemoaning the loss of something really beautiful—I am grieving the loss of a love that asked me to expand in ways I didn’t know I could. I am lamenting a person who took a chance and stood in the hard places with me, but realized he wasn’t quite ready to be there yet (which is okay).

I am mourning what was, so I can make room for what is.

I will grow soft here.

So much of my life has been marked by a wondering of whether I am too much or not enough.

I’ve always had this deep sense of knowing who I am, and yet, I’ve felt this tension about whether or not the me I know to be true will ever be loved or accepted by someone. And, in the midst of this tension I’ve found myself feeling like men often like me in theory—the way I see the world is “cute” or the firey side of me is “fun”—but in practice? not so much. The way I see the world and perceive things becomes a threat to the way they want to see the world, and the fiery side of me becomes intimidating.

But, over the last few months, I’ve come to the firm realization that I have always been enough, and not everyone will be able to handle all of who I am—and that’s okay.

I don’t need to shrink for someone, nor should I have to. And, if I’m too much or not enough for someone, then perhaps that says more about them than it does about me. So, in this season of growth, I’ve made the resolution to no longer apologize for what I’ve been through or the things that have molded me into the person I am today.

I am grateful for this deep knowing of myself, for the way I see the world, the fierceness that ignites when I’m passionate or enthralled. The traumatic things that are a part of my story do not define me, but they have influenced who I’ve become. And, I am so thankful for those who see me, hear me, and know me without judgment or labels.

So, as I make my way into the magical decade known as my thirties, I’m no longer apologizing for who I am or what I’ve been through. And, while I believe in growing and changing as I live, and learn, and become—please don’t think you’re going to change the parts of me that you don’t like.

Am I exorbitant or inapt? Maybe to some. Am I sorry? No. And, I would apologize for being so impenitent about who I am and what I want, but if you’ve read this far, you know I’m not doing that anymore.

I was not the little girl who daydreamed about getting married, or the one who had every detail of her wedding planned prior to the age of ten—instead, I fantasized about taking a boat to Antarctica, summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro, spending months wandering through Eastern Europe or exploring South America. I was also the little girl who wanted to know why boys could pee standing up and I couldn’t—I asked my mom and she told me (with what I can now see was a look of knowing) to, “go outside and try, let me know how it goes.” As you would expect, it didn’t work out too well. I had a vague idea that maybe I would get married at twenty-six or twenty-seven (which at the time I thought was old), but only if I happened upon it as I explored and adventured through life. Long story short, I was in absolutely no rush to find myself betrothed to someone who wanted me to settle down in suburbia (aka purgatory).

So, I arrived at my small, Christian liberal arts college, not knowing a soul and without a desire to date. But, two weeks into my freshman year, I found myself with a boyfriend—which was absolutely not the plan.

We dated all four years of college, and then, Christmas of our senior year, after a run on the beach in Florida, as sweat dripped down my face and pit marks swelled on my gray t-shirt (romantic, right?), he got down on one knee and proposed. So, here I was, engaged before the age of twenty-two, and currently destined to spend the remainder of my life in a Chicago suburb with a man who wanted to work for an insurance company—and the worst part was, I had convinced myself that this is what I wanted.

As luck would have it (or more likely, God), five months after his proposal (and five months before our wedding day), I found myself sobbing in my kitchen because my fiancé had told me it was God’s will and called off the wedding. I don’t believe in the flippant use of the phrase “God’s will,” because I think it leads to a lack of ownership and predicates the idea that we are without fault. But, when I cerebrate on my broken engagement and where I’ve found myself since, I can see that God really was present in the midst of all of this.

And just like that, the Christian fairytale I never actually wanted was over—I would no longer be fated to drive a minivan, exclusively wear J. Crew, and live in a home that looked exactly like the fifty other families in our suburban development.

But, here’s the thing, I’m not saying that living a life of comfort and settling down somewhere is inherently a bad thing, or that my ex-fiancé was a bad person (he’s a wonderful guy)—it just wasn’t for me at twenty-two. And, when I reflect on the eight years since my harrowing breakup and broken engagement, it’s easy to see how deflated I would have become, the way the light in me would have dulled (hindsight is 20/20 after all). There was something in me (something that had been there since I was a little girl) that needed to explore, that needed to adventure, that needed to be untethered to the constraints of gender roles or the Christian ideal of the submissive wife.

That’s not to say that I don’t desire to love and be loved, or that I don’t think marriage is a beautiful, magical thing, because I do. But, I also hold firmly to the belief that marriage is not a prerequisite for being a whole person, and loving someone or being loved by someone should never mean one person is required to shrink or become opaque.

What if the connection we so deeply desire is really a commitment to willingness? What if love is a freeing (for yourself and for others)? What if it’s a way to magnify the light in someone else? Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and that’s not what love truly is, but it’s what I’m holding out for.

I was seventeen years old when my older brother died, and Julia, my little sister, was fourteen. We were young and our parents did the best they could to walk with us through the loss of him—they wanted to protect us, they wanted the pain to be less difficult to carry. So, they told us a narrative, one I think they really wanted to believe too, because the questions that lay in the wake of Bruce’s death were scary and big, and sometimes it’s easier to pretend that we don’t know.

I had Bruce’s story (or at least the story I’d been told) so beautifully packaged that it rolled off my tongue without effort whenever someone would say, “do you mind me asking how he died?” But the words always tasted a little false on my lips—they weren’t quite right, they were sprinkled with mendacity and they didn’t leave enough room for the truth.

There were several nights in the years right after Bruce’s death, where I would be overcome by what I now recognize as deep agony, completely overwhelmed by the idea that he had taken his life in the early morning hours of Saturday, June 21, 2008. And I would weep hard because I didn’t know how to reconcile this possible truth with the hideous fact that I had been told suicide was a direct line to hell.

So, I kept telling the story I’d been told—the story of Bruce going to rehab and coming back changed. The story of Bruce spending the last week of his life in Minnesota and crying as he sang the words to How Great Thou Art, and asking to stay up late to do bible study with his friends. The story that left out the part about him getting kicked out of rehab early, or how he got drunk at a party the night before he left for Minnesota, and nearly died when he attempted to drive himself home, or that he had been drinking the night he died.

The story that left out the many times I lay awake at boarding school the weeks before he went to rehab, knowing the phone would ring and I’d have to talk Bruce off a sometimes literal, sometimes figurative ledge. Or the story that left out the panic I felt two days before Bruce died, when I awoke to several missed phone calls from him and a text that read, “I’m done.”

I don’t know if Bruce took his own life, but I think it’s likely or at the very least, possible. At seventeen, this wasn’t something I knew how to resolve or integrate because of the cultural and religious stigmas surrounding suicide. But as I’ve worked through processing the loss of Bruce over the last thirteen years, I’ve been able to unlearn these harmful imputations and replace them with compassion and grace. And, in the midst of that, I’ve been able truly understand that we are not our worst day—that Bruce was not his worst day.

Will I know the truth about Bruce’s death this side of heaven? Probably not, and I’m okay with that. But I do want Bruce to know that his story matters and I want to leave space for the mystery and the unknown in his narrative.

I want Bruce to be free from the expectations I had for him, to be whoever it is that he yearned to be, and to know that no matter what—no matter how he left this earth—that he is seen, and known, and deeply loved.

Rest in peace, Bruce, you are loved just as you are.