Remembering Our Friend, Remembering the Urgency

This post is brought to you by Christiana ❤️

Last week, we lost another friend at Romaniv to the great enemy: death. This is the second boy who has died since I arrived in the fall, and as always, my heart is heavy. I know that he is safe in the arms of Jesus, and the suffering that he endured here is over, and yet I am grieved by how his story here ended. I want to see more redemption in the lives of our boys. I want them to experience more than the walls of Romaniv. I want them to have the love and safety of a family. And for yet another friend, that is no longer a possibility. 

Over and over, we have lost boys who we hoped in our hearts would come to live with us. Sometimes we even spoke their names out loud when making plans for the future. Living in the time and place where we do, we know all too well how little control we have over the future. But this reality—that our friends can and do die at Romaniv before we get them out—it is a particular kind of hard. Today, Kim and I named all the boys who have died since she and Jed started this work. Ten names. Ten precious people. And with each, the gut-wrenching feeling is the same.  

There is a grinding hopelessness at Romaniv, and it can wear us down, too. As much as we love the boys at Romaniv, as big as our hearts and dreams are for them, we can’t make Romaniv into something that it’s not. We can go, we can spend time with the boys, we can build relationships and cultivate goodwill with the staff and administration, but we cannot make Romaniv into a good place for our friends to live. After all the years that the rest of the team has faithfully spent at Romaniv, what stands out to me is how little it has changed. It is not exactly the same as when I first visited nearly seven years ago, but it is still a place I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Despite every effort, our boys’ lives continue to be something more endured rather than fully lived. Our boys continue to die. And we continue to wonder about the circumstances of their deaths: was this death preventable, were they alone or was someone with them at the end, is anyone else mourning their loss as we do?  

And once again, we recognize the urgency of our work. Our life on the Homestead often feels anything but urgent. We have cultivated a peace and a slowness that belies the urgency, that shields from the life and death nature of what we are doing. Each time, it’s like we have snatched another guy from the clutches of Romaniv and settled down in our little oasis to do the hard, slow work of really living. And in our oasis, the days can feel full, even busy, but rarely urgent. Yet there remains an urgency underlying all of this peace. We have our guys here with us, but more remain in the institution. Will they get to experience the love and safety of a family on this side of heaven? When we are ready to take the next guy, will he still be there?  

So we strive towards our goals knowing that this work is truly a matter of life and death. We work towards having the capacity and space to add another friend to our permanent Dim Hidnosti family. We work towards a sustainable life here that can be replicated by other people who have a heart for deinstitutionalization. And we fight against the numbness or hardness that can creep in as a defense against the hopelessness of Romaniv. We fight to continue showing up at Romaniv with open hearts and an eagerness to connect with our boys, to be with them and build relationships with them, to let them know that they are never forgotten or alone. It’s challenging to do year after year, but our friends deserve it. Each one deserves it.