I may not have mentioned in the most conducively lucid way possible before, but my mother’s cousin died last week. She was 41. She has two young children. I am sad.

For the most part, I’ve gone back to work and gotten settled into my good old ridiculous routines of self-destruction. But sometimes, I pause and it all floods back and it just hurts, so badly.

I found out at 8:00 a.m. on Thursday, 16 March. She’d been in the hospital sometime (a day? a week? I don’t know) after contracting pneumonia. Or something. Ninety percent of what I know at all is from my brother’s communications from overhearing anyone talking. Or my overhearing things. We don’t ask questions. Never have.

She’d been feeling tired. Spent. Worn out. She’s never been healthy.

She’s always been kind. And fun. And loving. And faithful.

She was tired. She went to the hospital Wednesday night with chest pains. She died on Thursday morning. In the hospital. At 4:30.

While her husband was in Afghanistan.

And her babies were asleep at home.

And I was in Utah, pleading with my dog to please just go to sleep.

And I am struck with the normalcy & blandness of my own life the time at which it happened. And I’m struck with the inability of my soul, so inextricably intertwined in hers by some strange bond of blood and experience, judgments and distance—and those times when she’d hang on Daniel’s arm and grin, “Smile if you love me”—couldn’t know. It couldn’t prepare me for the reality of it all. And I’m a little offended. Hurt, if you will.

The last time I talked to her was Monday, 26 December 2005. I was sitting at the back corner booth at the McDonald’s off of Interstate 85 in Lavonia, Georgia. Mom, Nana, Daniel, and I had driven halfway to meet Mama and Papa so I could see them before I went back to Utah the next day. We sat around the table and laughed. Leigh called on Papa’s cell phone and he passed the phone to me. She asked how it was to be at home. I sighed, “Oh, you know, it’s … ok.” But she didn’t know. She sounded nearly taken aback when she responded, “I love to be here. I love it at home.” I hurried through goodbye and passed the phone to the next person and it continued around the table. While Mama was saying goodbye, I took a picture of Nana with everyone’s food piled around her and we all laughed.

While I was preparing to fly to Atlanta, I thought back on our conversation and analyzed it as our last. At first, I was nearly offended. How could she judge me the last time I talked to her? How could she take what I said and disagree with it? How could she not understand how hard it was for me to be at home? It wasn’t fair for her to judge me for the choices I’d made and for the consequences which were inevitable—but understandable—right? And how could that be fair, that it’d be the last time, and I’d offended her and made her upset with me?

As I traveled, and as I spent time with these people—these proud, faithful people who have lived in the same small town and known the same people all their lives and who, meaning well and more by reflex than sense of duty, had filled two refrigerators to capacity with fried chicken—I realized what it meant for Leigh to be home. And how, as I replayed the tape of our conversation in my mind, it must feel to these people when someone leaves the sense of comfort and security they know they can always have.

It wasn’t until the plane ride home when I realized what had happened and I repented, for being so judgmental myself. And I understood what she meant. It was so very good to be at home. To have a history, and to find comfort in its sweet unchangeability. I realized that for the first time since I’d left three years ago, I wasn’t banging down the door to hop the next plane out of there.

I lingered in the kitchen in South Carolina before my mother and I left for Atlanta, the night before I flew back to Salt Lake City. I took in the scents and hugged the people and came to terms with the differences in where I’ve been and where I am. And I took comfort in being home. Not where I was raised the majority of my growing up years, but where it mattered. Where it felt like home should feel like. Where days of the week aren’t pronounced with that final ‘a’ and where they play music while you pray in church. And where the people are so good and so full of good intentions and so much the stability I cling to as the goodness of my childhood.

So yeah. I guess you could say it isn’t all bad—and why dwell—because there were all those moments of transparent self-realization. But I don’t buy it, yet. I’m not at the point where the last conversation I had with her was worth it for the end result. Because it feels wrong to have even had the opportunity to grow through the sorrow I and everyone around me felt.

It’s so easy to console someone when you can’t feel the grief. And I’m really great at rephrasing the clichéd standbys. But when it’s this close, and when our family is so dichotomously combative and fiercely close all at the same time and when her seven-year-old stood at her casket and stroked her mama’s hair, “She’s better off now,” just couldn’t cut it.