by J.J. (12th Grade)

I sat on a cool veranda in Abbottabad, watching a doctor cut into my brother’s foot, and listened to my world quietly crumbling around me.

My family moved to Pakistan in 2007 as Bible translators. By the time I was twelve, I considered my life there to be pretty stable. My father’s colleagues were my “aunts” and “uncles,” and their children were my friends. As the second of five brothers, travel in our ancient Toyota Land Cruiser could be tedious; but I loved when at last we would arrive at a destination and step out of the car on shaky legs, met with the chilly, pine-needle air of Murree, or the dusty metal gate of a friend’s house. Pakistan was the only true home I had ever known.

This all changed one day in the middle of my older brother’s ingrown toenail surgery. I sat next to H.J. (the patient), an older missionary (the doctor), and Daddy (the patient’s chauffeur), all gathered round a marble porch that we had converted into an impromptu operating room. I, the tag-along, had armed myself with a book for the drive—the three-hour commute between Islamabad and Abbottabad is dangerously boring—but for the moment it lay limp in my hands as I listened to Daddy inform the doctor that the government was delaying progress on our family’s visas. Again. And that the same thing was happening to our friends. And that some had already been asked to leave. And that if ours weren’t renewed soon, it would be prudent, while we still had time, to prepare to leave Pakistan—for good.

As we drove away, my father asked how my brother and I felt about the situation. I assured him that I was of course sad—who wouldn’t be?—but all-round okay. Having ascertained that this was enough to satisfy him, I reached for my book, grateful not so much for the comfort of reading material as for a shield to hide my eyes, which were beginning to fill with tears. I was not okay.

Grief, for all its potency, can be very easy to ignore. In my final months in Pakistan, I found myself downplaying my loss—my troubles weren’t really that serious. No one had died, after all. And besides being unnecessary, grief seemed unspiritual, the antithesis of all the good things Christians are supposed to strive for: contentment regardless of circumstances, cheerfulness and joy, even simply a “good attitude.” Some part of me, surely, protested the unfairness of leaving everything I knew and held dear; but I rationally hushed that part, and busied myself with packing, plane travel, and eventually life in the United States.

In many ways, I had to return to Pakistan to realize how much I’d lost leaving it. Five years and two transcontinental moves after that initial toe surgery, I sat on a creaky tree swing near the same toe-surgery veranda, trying to piece together a poem about grief. A few days earlier my family had boarded a plane to Pakistan for one last visit. After so long in western culture, I’d expected my old “home” to feel backward and foreign. That is not what happened. For the first time in what seemed like either forever, or only yesterday, I saw my parents dressed in a shalwar kameez and dupatta, woke up to the Muslim call of prayer, ate questionable food, and threw up. (Some experiences brought back more nostalgia than others.) I’d forgotten life could be so normal, so right.

Most of all, I learned that I needed to grieve—and that that’s okay. I am (slowly) coming to see grief as a very beautiful, even holy thing. It can be embraced, not avoided. The poem I wrote that day on the tree swing likened tears to “silver stones,” a metaphor I originally chose because teardrops might look like small, grey pebbles. Since then, however, I have realized it is fitting for an even deeper reason: tears are precious.