Let’s fast-forward to a few weeks ago.
I’m in my basement, trying to get a mystery stain out of a t-shirt. I’ve scrubbed it, I’ve let it soak, I’ve used every stain-removal spray in my house and washed it in two kinds of detergent. I’ve made a little bit of progress but the outer ring of this stupid stain refuses to budge.
Now I have dozens of t-shirts, and when one is no longer fit to wear in public, it’s usually relegated to a workout or pajama shirt until I eventually toss it. This particular shirt has more problems than just the stain. What was once a brilliant aqua blue has faded to the point where there are white spots. The armpits are a distinctly dingy shade. There’s a small tear in the side and the threads around the collar are beginning to fray. If this were any other shirt, it would have been in the garbage a long time ago.
So why am I so bent on removing this stain? Let me tell you a story about this shirt.
When I was fundraising for the World Race, I had t-shirts made. They were blue with a world map and the text “Let your light shine” across the front. I sold almost 100 of them, mostly to family, friends at college, and a handful of people from church. Naturally I got one for myself, and when I left for the Race, the shirt came with me. It was one of four t-shirts I started with and the only one that made it all the way to the end.
I often joked that this shirt had superpowers. No matter what got on it, be it mud, coffee, various sauces, or just about anything I encountered, I could always get the stains out without fail, and by using only a bucket, detergent, and a toothbrush. I wore that shirt the day my squad and I moved four thousand bricks up a mountain and still, I managed to remove all of that red brick dust that destroyed my some of squadmates’ clothes.
It became a running joke for me and effectively a competition with myself to keep that shirt going as long as I possibly could. But the lifestyle of the Race and the days of sweating in intense heat caught up to it – when I got home, my favorite shirt had lost its superpowers. It was far too beaten up to wear anywhere outside my house, and there was this one pesky stain that defied all of my elbow grease.
Recently I rediscovered the shirt at the bottom of a drawer, and decided that this stain was not going to win against me. I soaked it for days, I scrubbed it over and over, I even used that expensive oxyclean stuff on it. I worked on this for literally two weeks and there was very little to show for my work.
The other day, I pulled the shirt out of the bucket it had been soaking in and looked at it. There was very little point in what I was doing – even if I did get the stain out, this old threadbare shirt wasn’t good for much. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away… why?
A thought arose in my mind.
“Oh gosh, does letting go of the shirt represent letting go of the Race?”
It hit me like a ton of… well, bricks, appropriately. I had let this old, dirty t-shirt mean something so much more. Somewhere in my subconscious, hanging on onto the shirt and restoring it as much as I could meant I could hang onto the race.
That’s when I figured out that I still had more to grieve. It’s an odd word, one that’s usually assigned to funerals and other extremely somber occasions, to the point where it seems almost sacrilegious to use in any other context. Still, grieving is what I had to do.
Why? Because I hadn’t let myself miss the Race as much as I should have, because I felt that to do so would be wrong. But the point of grief is to do so and move on, and to define it as anything less robs you of the time and space to grieve in a healthy way.
So what I’ve been walking through in the last week is the awkward process of “letting myself miss the World Race.” The funny thing is, the way that’s been going isn’t so much the big things like “I miss Swaziland” or “I miss the girls at Sending Hope International” or even “I miss my squadmates.” All of these things are true, but it’s not what comes to the forefront of my mind.
It’s seeing a huge shooting star on the way home from work at two o’clock in the morning, and feeling a deep-rooted longing for one specific rock on one specific mountain on a night when I saw one just like it.
It’s dipping a shortbread cookie into my coffee and knowing full well that if I closed my eyes at that moment, I would believe I was at our kitchen table in Honduras. Just from one bite of a cookie.
It’s getting a text from a teammate and being reminded that even though we live across the country from each other now, at one point we were only separated by a hallway and didn’t have to coordinate schedules just to talk.
It’s those little moments that make my soul happy and sad at the same time.
It’s weird. There’s no other way to describe it, and I don’t anticipate those moments ceasing anytime soon. The thing is, it’s okay to miss those things, without a knee-jerk reaction to stuff the “missing down,” as long as it doesn’t interfere with your life now.
I finally said to myself “You don’t have to be afraid of missing the Race. It’s okay that you do – it means that it was a wonderful year.”
Oh, and about the shirt. I gave up on my quest to remove the stain, and it’s just a workout shirt now.
After all, it’s just an ugly old t-shirt.
