Ham rolls.
First, you make the ham rolls.
It doesn’t matter that nobody in the house is hungry. Eventually someone will be and the sandwiches will be waiting. Two little bites of ham on a soft dinner roll with a small dab of butter. (Mustard is too strong for mourners.)
***
I’ve been waiting for the call since we got to Santo Domingo. Maybe even before then. (Yes, definitely before then.)
I’ve been waiting for the call since Papa John went into a memory care facility right before we left Brussels. I felt like I was living on borrowed time when I was able to sneak in a quick in-and-out trip to visit him and Grandma Lucy in Minnesota while we were on Home Leave a few months ago. With Papa’s body and mind ravaged by Parkinson’s, I had been surprised by the tiny moment of not-quite-translucent lucidity when he turned to his dining companion and asked her which embassy she had worked at — one question that told me that he was still capable of putting enough of the puzzle pieces together to know that it was me standing next to him.
I’ve been waiting for the call, you see, so it came as a surprise when the pre-call warning text my mom sent this morning indicated that that the bad news wasn’t about Papa.
Uncle Rick had died.
The somewhat goofy, sometimes stubborn, and incredibly big-hearted younger brother of my Papa passed away suddenly yesterday.
I was supposed to spend the day prepping us for the finally-here move into our permanent quarters (which are only as permanent as Joe’s assignment here, of course). I was supposed to be packing up the things we have with us and tidying up a bit.
Instead, I spent it thinking about the Uncle-Rick-shaped-hole in the world. Of the day he and his sister, my Great Aunt Barb, lost track of their car on the sprawling West Point campus at the most inopportune time during my brother’s graduation celebration almost ten years ago now. Of the emails Rick sent me last spring when my heart was in Minneapolis and my body was in Brussels with my newborn. Of the comments he left on my Facebook posts and his reminders that it was time to post my pictures of Nicolas for Nicolas’s adoring “fans.” Of his family that he loved so very dearly.
I spent the day thinking of Uncle Rick so the next text wasn’t even on my radar before it pinged just before dinner: Joe’s grandma died this morning.
And while I sit here waiting for the third piece of sad news that I know will be coming (because these things always come in threes even if Joe says they don’t), I can’t help but feel like I should be doing something. Not just waiting for service or celebration arrangements to be made so that we can figure out if we can or can’t swing a trip back to the States. I should be doing something.
I’m thinking of ham rolls and how I learned — when Great-Grandma Alcott died the spring that I was twelve — that it’s what we (of German/Scandinavian Lutheran descent) do when somebody dies. We cut up the ham and butter the rolls and it gives us something to do with our hands while we wait for what’s next.
There’s plenty of ham here. But the rolls are different and the butter is different and there’d be nobody here to eat those tiny little sandwiches if I made them.
And so I wait, hands mostly idle, for what comes next.
