The Craziest Week of My Life (I hope)

I don’t even know where to begin. I think I’ve passed through at least 4 distinct emotional phases since my last post, with all the attendant impulses and inspirational moments. Now, I seem to have landed on impatience and restlessness, which is not where I set out from. And, since I’m not sure how to distill the emotional magnitude of much of my thinking over the past 2 weeks, I’m just going to opt for a semi-spare telling, with inevitable follow-up posts that'll spin out some of the thoughts I collected on journal pages.

Leaving Lithuania for Budapest and ending up in Denver:

February 10th, I took the 7 a.m. train to Vilnius, the 2:30 flight to Prague, the 5 p.m. flight to Budapest, and the late minibus to my friend’s Buda apartment. It was a long day. Monday was packed with class visitations, observations, lunch, info gathering at Central European University. It wasn’t until about 3:30 that I got a chance to sit down and check email, only to find a 20-hour old message from my mom telling me that Grandpa Stewart had been brought into the ER and was now in hospice care, not expected to survive the night.

I immediately shifted into crisis-planning mode, pushing back the panicky “I can’t believe this is happening NOW!” thoughts, and by the grace of God, was able to go right away to a travel agent (on campus at CEU) and have him book me on the noon flight out of Budapest on Tuesday. I had to cut my visit at CEU short, but only by about 5 hours shorter than originally planned.

With my ticket in hand, I was able to take a mind-clearing walk around Pest that evening, through my old neighborhoods, and then a frosty morning walk the next morning on the Buda side, near the favorite cafés and churches. On my way to the airport, I stopped by the university Tuesday morning to pick up a couple things and to check my email. That’s when I got the final news.

Glen Charles Stewart, my grandpa, passed away at 4 p.m. Monday afternoon, February 11th.

I took that news and got on the metro out to the airport, checked my tiny 3-day backpack, and crossed the ocean for the 15th time in 3 years.

I could go on and on and on about God’s blessings to me and my family that week. About the signs and provisions and comforts that we experienced through it all. The best I can say is that grandpa’s was a good death. I had been praying on my knees in my room in Budapest Monday night that, because Grandpa had been faithful to God his whole life, that God would be faithful to him now at the time of his death. And He was. Grandpa was 93, diagnosed with bone cancer that had begun to spread. And yet, up to the end, he subsisted on 2 ibprofen for pain and was still driving his own car. He didn’t have to undergo debilitating hospital treatments, or move out of his independent apartment into assisted living. He didn’t have to endure a long, slow decline. God just came and took him Home.

And, if there is a family anywhere capable of putting the “fun” in “funeral,” it is ours. Saturday night after the funeral, me and my cousins played card games late into the night. We watched embarrassing VHS family videos of Christmases and camping-trips past. We laughed SO hard that our abdominal muscles cramped. We sat up late into the morning in the hot tub, talking about Grandpa, and our family, and Dietrich Bonhoffer, and faith, and marriage, and singleness, and funny movies, and…. The whole time felt like another gift passed onto us by Grandpa. He gave us many things – passion for travel, love of the outdoors, the curse of car trouble, a trove of funny sayings, a ferocious faith in Our God – but last weekend it felt like the greatest gift he left us was each other.