Nunc Coepi, An Email, Now I Begin

I woke up (yesterday) to an email reminding me I needed to handle something I had been avoiding.

Truthfully, I had been sitting on the task for longer than I wanted to admit.

What made it hit home was the date attached to it—the same date Jon died. The same date we moved into this house nearly twenty-one years ago.

I knew right away what it meant. It was time to handle it. There was a sudden weight of shame, not fully understanding why it has taken so long for me to handle this thing. It doesn’t matter what “the thing” is. Perhaps you have something like that too. I bet most of us carry something we’ve been avoiding.

I’ve learned in loss that some things take time to face, to handle, to take the next step.

I have been pondering how long it sometimes takes to step through the shattered pieces of a life when loss has been so devastating and so prominent—especially when the loss is a spouse.

Decisions that once belonged to two people now fall to one. Some things linger longer than we expect, not because we are unwilling, but because grief reshapes the way we move through the world.

In many ways, life has looked like that lately. I’ve been slowly taking steps to update and redefine a few places in our house that need attention. Like every other room here—including the rooms of our hearts—it is part of the slow work of rebuilding a life after loss.

We are slowly rehabbing and redefining so much. Life feels like that now, too. One small step at a time.

Earlier this morning I came across something else while moving a few things around, maybe I was procrastinating on the email. But while putzing about, thinking through my options related to the situation in the email, I found a “newish” journal someone had sent me during the long months of caregiving. A gift meant just for me as so many other things during that time were being given to Jon. When she mailed it, the friend’s note inside encouraged me to keep writing.

Inside, on the very first page, I had written two words back in 2022:

Nunc Coepi.

Now I begin.

I also wrote a few quotes and a note about her telling me to keep writing. So I did, maybe not much in the journal, but I wrote. I wrote about Milk and Honey and the Desert Road Here and Cupcakes and Hope here

I wrote a few things in the journal a few times back then. And one more entry in January of 2023 on a blank page in a new year: Nunc Coepi.

And then the pages went left blank, pages quiet. Life became heavy and heavier. The days filled with hospital visits, decisions, hospice and the slow reckoning with everything we feared. Writing took place in other spaces, mostly from uncomfortable couches and while navigating the declining health and progressing brain cancer of my husband, Jon.

Not long after that, Jon died.

This morning (Friday) I held that journal again and thought about that time and those words. And how many times I said them over the years.

Now I begin, again.

I have begun this many times, many mornings, many new days over the last several years.

As I wrestled with how I would handle the situation—the email—that needed attention sooner than later, a notification came through for a comment left by a complete stranger who had happened upon my blog.

He shared that while writing a poem about a Blue Heron—a bird he described as a messenger from God—he was further researching its meaning, he had come across my website and some reflections I had written about blue herons. I have written several times (go here and here) about how a Blue Heron has been a consistent messenger from God and, in a way, from Jon.

If that timely message from a stranger who had found my blog post “Blue Heron: To Be Seen, Known, Loved” wasn’t a little wink, today I’m not sure what is.

It felt like a quiet nudge from above as I grappled with taking the steps I needed to handle this “piece of business” of life after loss.

I felt like I heard Jon whisper,

“Heather, it’s okay to take care of this thing that has been hanging over your head. The thing that has kept you up at night. Now is the time. You know what you need to do. You always do.”

These are the kinds of conversations I would normally have had with Jon. We would talk through what we ought to do, how to move forward, what made the most sense. Then one of us would handle the thing.

How do you proceed alone when you have always decided and planned everything together?

Now those conversations happen in prayer.

It is good to know he is working on our behalf, interceding for the kids and for me. It is something I hold close in my heart.

But it is not the same.

And here I was once again seeing Jon’s name appear—even as I had already begun the process of sharing his death certificate to remove his name from something once held in both of our names. Ugh.

Still, I finally took the brave step to move forward.

I made the call. I made decisions. I took the next step.

After the phone call to finally properly handle the thing, something shifted. A weight that had been sitting on my shoulders felt like it had been placed in the right hands. Something that has kept me up too many nights felt like hope for rest again. A resolution was coming. A solution to something long “unhandled” had begun to take shape.

When I shared with the kids what I had done, we all felt the relief of my taking that step. We all know the cost. They know (by watching) how hard some parts of moving forward without their dad has been, can be. They knew certain decisions weighed more heavily on me and took more time to discern. They see how long some things take to manage, rebuild, handle, and face.

Not for lack of trying.

Grief simply rearranges the pace of life.

Grief simply rearranges the pace of life.

Heather lebano

Then, almost immediately after that call and while explaining to the kids, my next steps, a text message not really meant for me, but related to the topic of the original email came through addressed “for Jon.”

The timing and the content of the message couldn’t have been more appropriate—or more funny.

And for a moment it felt almost as if Jon himself was saying from the other side of the veil:

Well done, Heather.

Later in the day, though I didn’t need another affirmation (maybe only the affirmation to share this story) a magazine I had ordered a while back arrived in the mail. While flipping through the pages, there they were again—the same two words I had written in that journal back in early 2023.

Nunc Coepi.
Now I begin.
Perhaps in more ways than one.

“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

Isaiah 43:19