Stress&Peace

My time with my family was short, but it felt longer than I expected it to--perhaps because of the emotionally draining and intense nature of the days I spent at home.  It seems like we had relatives at our house at almost all times, and then of course between the viewing and the services, there was even more time spent with relatives, some close and some distant.  I appreciated everyone who showed up to express their sympathies, but it definitely did wear on me after a while to hear so many people say "This must be so tough; I know how much time you spent with her."  Not that they were wrong, but each time I heard that served as an overwhelming reminder that yes, this is, indeed tough to go through.

Throw on top of that my efforts to make progress on at least something school-related in my spare moments (made good progress on my grad speech) and the gnarly sleep-schedule that jet-lag brings about, and I'm currently feeling an odd combination of peace and stress.  I feel peace in my decision to come home.  It was the right choice and I'm so thankful that I could spend this time with family.  At the same time, I feel exhaustion, and stress at what lies ahead.  You see, the amount of time left in the school-year is significantly less than I'd fully realized when I was hastily putting together plans for when I'd be out of the country.  Yes, there's grading I need to do, but more than that, I'm realizing that I'll have to truncate and even cut out a lot of stuff I'd hoped to do in my various classes during the last week of school.

Even the work currently in progress in my various classes will finish with barely any time to spare--I hope and pray that timing is on my side!

Perhaps what I need to do is just take a deep breath and resign myself to simply letting things unfold as they may.

I've never been good at this.