More Time

When I was eighteen years old, I thought I was going to die.

There was a diagnosis (cancer). There was a prognosis (favorable). And there was a treatment plan.

The doctors and nurses reassured me every time I had an appointment, that the type of cancer I had was, as of the last few decades, very responsive to treatment. Despite the reassurances, I still remember the overwhelming and crippling fear of being able to see, for the first time, how quickly the feeling of living can turn into the feeling of dying.

I have been thinking about that a lot recently. That had I been born a half a century earlier than I was, I most likely would have died before my twentieth birthday. I think about how every person ever diagnosed with my same type of cancer, whether they were born before or after me, most likely did what I did in the aftermath of diagnosis: beg for more time.

I imagine we were all united in that prayer…the asking for more time to live. But I know that only some of us actually got it.

This last year, it really hit me: that the past few decades of my life were actually the “more time” I had pleaded for. How I’m actually living out the hours, days, and years which, at some point, I was terrified I would never get to see.

I was given the “more time” I asked for. And within it, I was given more experiences, and more travel, and more friendships, and more laughter, and more tears. And I was given you.

You were a part of the life I so desperately pleaded for on the floor of my bedroom all those years ago: meeting you, loving you, losing you, and, yes, even grieving you. All of those moments of “you” etched into minutes I longed to see and now hold as memories. It begs the question: how could I view any of this, any of you, as loss?

I didn’t want to die at eighteen. I didn’t.

And I know you didn’t want to die at twenty eight. Yet you did.

I know no part of you could have believed that by the time you were finally old enough to drive a car, you had more years behind you than you did ahead.

I know you didn’t want to die, but it happened. You died first, and the rest of us can only follow.

I haven’t died the way you did, not yet, but I have died in other ways during the “more time” I’ve been given. That time has been punctuated by a different kind of death: the dark nights of the soul kind of dying.

I haven’t died like you have, but I have had my world go black many times since you did. The kind of dark brought about as quickly as a camera shutter closing: each disappointment, each struggle, each loss and unexpected twist of life reducing my life to the black square found in the center of a Polaroid before details of a new image begin to emerge.

I haven’t died like you have, but I have gotten better at the dying part of living because of you.

I know how to let things and people go now. I no longer cling to the image I have of myself, or cling to people that walk in and then walk back out of my life. Those small hurts that always seemed so big…I can shoulder them now. I can let life go black now because I have seen that new images can only develop in dark places.

I can do all of these small dyings now because of you. In a way, you showed me how to do it: how to die. But also how to live out the rest of the “more time” that I asked for all those years ago; the “more time” that I got but you for some unknowable and heart-rending reason did not.

And to finally see it for what it is: a gift.

What He Made Me

And when he died, she wove him into poetry
That she chanted like spells…

I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but a few months after he died, after a seemingly endless stretch of time during which I could find no words to help me describe what life felt like inside my grief, all of a sudden, the words started coming.

They would come one by one at first. And like the rough surface which a snake uses to shed its skin, words would allow me to slip out of the moment I was in and pass on to the next.

The essays I wrote during those first years serve as exoskeletons: each one taking the form of a past version of myself. And while I have more or less retained the same shape over the six years since he died, I have found that I have grown imperceptibly larger from the loss.

Reading my writings from those initial years of grief feels much like gazing at the artifacts of an ancient city; there are remnants and fragments of myself in them which serve as the foundation of what came after. It’s like looking at a geologic cross section of life.

In one of my first essays written almost a year after he died, it was clear that I had grown fed up with hearing how inspiring and beautiful John and I’s story was to others, and in the midst of this frustration I wrote that, “I wished with all my heart that I was the one hearing these stories,” and, “not the one telling them.”

I wrote those words half a decade ago because I meant them. But I also wrote them as someone who could not yet grasp or understand the profundity of the stories she had been entrusted with.

Luckily the words I wrote early in my grief took root somewhere out of sight as layers of time, experience, and insight covered over them. And those roots grew deeper and have weaved and pushed their way upwards towards all the words that were written after them. The words, and the stories that contain them, have threaded together somehow like the root systems of ancient trees, and now exist like a singular story…like a singular life. One that breathes in pain while breathing him back out into this world.

Years ago, I could not see the gift of being the one to tell others about him. Of being the one still breathing out a story. But I see it now:

The ancient Greeks believed that every hero ever worth remembering needed one thing in order for their legacy to live on. It wasn’t courage or virtue, even though many men died in the pursuit of them. It wasn’t circumstance or faith. It wasn’t fortune. And it wasn’t chance.

It was a poet.

A storyteller.

A person who knew their essence and who could wrap them into verse and sing them back to life long after they died.

The Greeks had a word for what the poets were charged with keeping alive: Kleos. It’s the light and glory of a person which shines through the stories told while remembering them.

It was a light and glory so bright, that it was believed even the gods, destined to live forever, envied mankind for it. The gods, it turns out, are more doomed than blessed by their immortality in this regard. Confined to an existence without true sacrifice, without true suffering, and without true risk…The gods grasp at what mankind easily has within its reach: living a life that is worthy of remembrance.

So the hero and writer are inextricably bound to one another in this way.

John could have left me as many things after he died. He could have left me cynical. He could have left me hopeless or faithless.

Instead: he left me a storyteller.

He left me a poet.

So what is the gift in that? What do I now see in the stories I tell that I could not years ago?

In short: I see everything in them.

Mythologist Martin Shaw believes that stories act as shields which we turn to when facing the evils and darkness of this world. We turn to them not to hide behind them, but to see the reflection of that which terrifies us in a different frame of reference. Just like the mythic hero Perseus who, in an effort to avoid being reduced to stone or cinder, could only face Medusa by gazing on her from the reflection of his shield, we who live outside of these myths, in all our human frailty, cannot stare at the monsters of our world for too long without hardening, fragmenting, and breaking.

We need our stories to face them.

A story is a powerful thing it turns out: while comforting its listener, it protects its teller. I’m not sure how this story, our story, has gone from one which I thought would destroy me to one which now protects me, but it has.

So in the telling of our story, I have found a shield. One which reshapes Grief, Rejection, Loneliness, Despair, or whatever other monsters may stalk this way and creep in the shadows. One that protects.

I have found a story that demands someone left to tell it.

Roll Call

In the military, there is a ritual for almost every major transition in both career and life.

The traditions and rites of passage practiced and passed down within the branches of our military serve almost as time capsules which contain remnants and reflections of days long passed. There is an antiquity to them which also carries with it a unifying element which elicits a kind of nostalgia in anyone who witnesses or participates in them.

To name a few: for a pilot in the Air Force there are dollar rides, namings, and fini flights which serve as landmarks as they move through their career.

And then there’s the missing man and the piano burns for when they die.

And though there is a vast difference of traditions amongst the various communities, one that is common across most of them is the roll call.

A roll call can take many forms:

There is the standard roll call which is very similar to what I, as a teacher, do when I take attendance. A formality that carries with it very little emotional importance.

But then there are the roll calls which happen in a squadron bar. These are the ones that I would hear story after raucous story about.

I always thought that squadron roll calls were nothing more than an excuse to gather and drink; all I knew was that the day after one, John would have nothing but murky details to share and a hangover to nurse. He’d describe them as best he could: the pilots would gather together, their call signs would be called out, and they would respond.

A call and response.

(And then…they would drink. And sing. And tell stories. And drink some more)

It wasn’t until John one day mentioned that the names of his deceased friends were also called out during roll call that the tradition began to carry with it a new resonance which even I as a civilian could appreciate. There was something about the vision of an entire squadron listening for their fallen friend’s name, and then sitting together in the brief silence or the “here-here’s” that followed that was profoundly moving.

(This moment would of course be followed by drinking. And singing. And the telling of stories all the while drinking some more)

The exact structure of a roll call varies across military branches: Sometimes the deceased’s name is called three times, sometimes just once. Sometimes it is their rank followed by their full name. Other times, in the case of squadron roll calls: it is simply the fallen pilot’s call sign.

Trojan, Stuck, Pyro…

Despite the differences, there is one consistent detail that all roll calls share: no matter how many times a fallen soldier’s name is called, or what name they are actually called by, their voice will never be the one to respond back to it.

The one consistent detail is that, for a split second, all of the deceased’s friends sit in that moment and exist in it without them.

And then they drink…

And they sing…

And drink some more…

So yes, the roll call is just a part of what takes place in the middle of a rowdy squadron, and yes the moment where their friend’s name hovers in the air before quickly evaporating into waves of squadron songs and tall tales is short lived, but their name was spoken nonetheless. Saying their name is important, even if they can’t say it back. Their name and all the energy and stories threaded into it is added to the air the entire squadron breathes for one night.

That’s why when you ask someone how to honor one of their fallen friends on Memorial Day, the most common response is: just say their name.

So this Memorial Day, do just that.

In the middle of whatever bar-b-q, bar, or pool party you end up at, in between the songs and the drinking and the story telling, take a page out of a flying squadron’s playbook…and say their names.

A New Story

“When you and I met, the meeting was over shortly; it was nothing. Now it is growing as we remember it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what our meeting inspires in me all my days ’til then: that is the real meeting.” –CS Lewis

I would ask John to tell me the story of how we met because I loved hearing him tell it.

There’s a feeling I get whenever I’m hearing or reading something profound; it’s a feeling that is only brought out through direct contact with the words; almost like the friction from a match right before the flame appears. There are moments in life that feel like that too: they hold us transfixed, almost in a sort of pleasure when we recollect or share them with others. Those are the good moments nestled within the good stories that allow us to breathe a little easier.

Hearing him tell the story of us meeting was like that for me.

How we met was such a chance encounter that I would refer to it as almost magical. And the feeling that would come after could only be described as “magic.” There was no other word I could think of to describe what the story of us meeting was.

It wasn’t until I found myself reading JRR Tolkien’s ideas on the difference between “magic” and “enchantment” that I realized I had picked the wrong word to describe what meeting John brought into my life, both when he was alive, and now long after.

Magic, Tolkien believed, is used to bend the reality of this world in order to match our desires. It is done with the intention to dominate those around us and make them submit to our whims, manifestations, and ultimately, to our will.

Enchantment on the other hand doesn’t attempt to bend and distort reality.

Rather, it calls us into another world, leads us away, and weaves us, little by little, into another story. A world connected to the one we were in, yet still all together separate. To enter an enchanted world is not an act of our will, but rather a submission of it to another’s.

Enchantment involves a choice. It is a call which invites us to leave where we are and venture onto another land.

Unlike magic, whether or not we choose to answer and surrender to that that call is up to us.

In the world of enchantment, if you allow it to do what it wills with you, you somehow become both more and less of yourself at the same time as you are cross-stitched into a reality inhabited by all the stories, histories, and myths that came long before.

Enchantment takes the story of John and I out of this common world of space and time and life and death and places it on higher ground into a world of “story” itself. The world where all good stories begin.

There, he and I are no longer two people who met one another seven years ago; he is no longer someone who died two years after that or someone whom I have grieved ever since.

In the enchanted world our story didn’t start seven years ago: It started the very first time a young man and a young woman ever caught one another’s eyes in the middle of a crowded room and felt the whole world around them disappear. It started the first time two people fought the odds, fought expectations, and fought the world as they knew it in order to be together.

We become an extension of every couple who ever gave up “land and title” for love and of every person who ever charged the gates of the underworld in an attempt to grasp a loved one’s hand just one more time. We become characters in a story where fiction and fact battle it out and leave people wondering what is true, what is exaggeration, and what is the fantasy of a grieving mind.

So it wasn’t magic after all that our story contained. And telling it does not reshape the fundamental reality of a world which I still inhabit yet he does not.

If I did have the power to reshape it, I would have willed our story to conclude with “and they lived happily ever after.” I would have willed us both long lives free of disease and discomfort. And I would have willed that for the rest of my life, I would get exactly what I want when and how I wanted it.

I don’t though.

And I thank God for that now because that ending, though it would have been a fine one, would have been confined by the limits of my own mind and imagination. It would have been an altogether different story, and though it would have been a longer one, I’m not sure if it would hold the same level of transfixion.

When he lived, I loved our story, but after he died, I couldn’t find it within myself to love or even understand the story of what would come after.

So I clung to our old stories and revisited them over and over, lighting match after match without knowing what to do with the few seconds of flickering flame that followed. It was only when I let the sparks do what they willed that I found they lit a way to enchanted places.

So I have followed them and allowed myself to be enchanted by the story of “what came after” instead because that is the story that called me from a death-scorched Earth into an upside down kingdom where graves are hallowed and all good stories go. I have allowed what I cannot love here to enchant and mystify me there instead.

And maybe one day I will be led to a place where we get to live and rest in that profound feeling which only comes when something worth being said is being said well. And I will re-meet John and we will remember one another in a new way. And instead of asking him to tell me the story of how we met, I will be the one with a good story he will ask me to tell.

And I will tell it.

I will tell him a new story, this story, of all that came after.

The Last Five Years

“Things might have been different, but they could not have been better.”
JRR Tolkien

There’s a recurring dream I have where, in a panic, I am searching for you.

These dreams are unlike the rest. Some dreams have felt like a visitation; these ones though, these take on a different kind of texture: a rougher one.

There’s a tension and a static in them, and I wake up more in a state of anxiety than peace.

In the last five years, I have learned that these stress dreams are common among grievers.

Apparently, many of us search for our loved ones in the only place where we can meet our thoughts on their own terms: in our sleep. And sometimes, we actually find our loved ones hidden in a deep recess of our dream world.

In the last five years, I have found you, held you, and woken up time and time again clinging to pieces of you that I ripped from dreams.

I never know what to expect during these encounters: Sometimes, I see you from a distance. Other times, you are up close and offer explanations for why you’ve been gone for so long.

There are a few times where the version of you I find is angry and wants to be left alone.

My friend thinks this happens because our human minds are never able to process and accept losing someone to death. After five years, I have to say that I think he is right. Though everyone is, in a sense, made to die, I don’t think we were made to be left behind. I just don’t think humans are cut out for that kind of separation from one another.

If it wasn’t for the fact that the five years I’ve spent mourning you are somehow still better years than the ones I had before I met you, I don’t think I would have been able to put one foot in front of the other. I certainly would not have gotten through that first year and been able to take those initial steps or breaths in a world in which you didn’t exist anymore.

The last five years have shown me that there’s a hidden power in that paradox: that the same love which can unmake us also can sustain us. I can’t figure out if it’s the most beautiful or most tragic part of being human.

On those mornings where I find myself being pulled from a dream-world where you still exist into this world where you do not, I struggle to remember the details of this life: the one I have lived in the half decade since you died. On those mornings, my real life is the one that feels surreal.

Sometimes, I have to recite the names of friends and memories and experiences like they’re the beads on a rosary.

It’s like a litany of the years: All the new people and moments that have mattered, that have helped me. All the ways I have changed more into the image of the person you always saw when you looked at me.

I list the people you never met, places you didn’t get to go, the plans I have coming up, and I call myself back into this life.

Nothing is too big or too small to mention: I remind myself about the coffee date I have next week with a friend. The workout I did yesterday where I felt my legs giving out and my lungs exploding. The conversation I had at work with a colleague. The phone date I’m supposed to have with my friend next Saturday morning.

And then I say your name and tell you “good morning.”

Five years later, I still see you in dreams, and I still speak to you when I wake up.

I still tell you things.

I guess this is why some people think that all these years later I have lost my mind.

If I’m perfectly honest: they’re right. I did lose it.

In the years since your accident, I have felt my entire mind and all my ways of thinking and all of my assumptions and all of my beliefs shatter and shake and slip away. All that I had built for myself was lost when you were.

Even my mind.

What good would it have done me to have kept it?

What good would it have done to have kept a mind that believed I was strong enough to overcome anything life threw at me. Even you were wrong about how strong I was; you told me once that I would always come back stronger in the face of hardship. Well, I didn’t. Not in the face of this.

There was no getting up from this.

I know you couldn’t have known that when you were alive; there was no way you could have known that you would be the key to my undoing. Or that I’d lose my mind after you. That I was nowhere near as strong as you believed.

The five years have shown me that you were wrong about me.

But you also had always told me I had a good heart. I never really knew what you meant, but I think I do now. In the last five years I have seen that my heart, though it wasn’t always in the right place when you knew me, still did what hearts were made to do…to love beyond themselves.

So you were right about me too.

Once again, there’s a power in that paradox somewhere, but it’s one that, five years later, I still struggle to put into words.

On “Being Ready” to Date Again

After your partner dies, there’s many things your friends and family worry about as they watch you attempt to navigate your way through grief.

At first, many of the check-in questions revolve around the basics of survival, and anyone who has ever lost someone fields questions like these every week:

Have you eaten?

Are you sleeping okay?

Do you need a glass of water?

As time moves on and as healing begins to settle in, the questions naturally begin to evolve, morph, and match the shape of your new life. People may ask how therapy is going. If you’ve settled back into work. What plans, if any, do you have for the future: are you moving? Are you traveling? Going to write a book? Start a foundation?

Once again, these questions are pretty standard.

Whether you’ve lost a parent, a partner, a sibling, or a friend, you ready yourself with prepackaged answers for people’s queries.

The questions we are asked as we grieve, though well meaning, sometimes add an extra layer of exhaustion onto what is already an exhausting process because each question comes with the implication that there are things you are “supposed” to either be doing or things you should start doing.

Now obviously things like eating food or getting sleep are nonnegotiables; even in my heaviest moments of early grief, I could understand that even though I didn’t want to eat, and though I may not have in fact eaten that day…the person who was asking genuinely had my best interest at heart when asked.

No matter who you’ve lost, it’s just part and parcel of grieving: people ask you things.

But as time marched forward and brought me with it, and after his first year death anniversary passed by, there was one question that began to pop up more and more. It’s an unassuming one that is unique to partner loss, and one that many of us spend too much time living under the shadow of:

It’s the question of whether we are ready to start dating or, to be more specific, if we are ready to go out and find love again.

I’ve been asked this question by friends and family, and I’ve been asked it by men who want to take me out.

The language of “readiness” is prevalent within the grief community as well.

I’m about five years out from my loss, and during this past half decade, I’ve watched countless grievers enter into new romantic relationships at various moments in their journey. Many of them, when announcing their engagement or marriage, end up mentioning the time or moment where they knew they were “ready” for the next person.

And while I can understand the spirit behind the question, “are you ready to date?” I’m really beginning to wonder whether the implications behind it do more harm than good.

It comes with the assumption that dating is a step someone must take as they move through their healing; like it’s on the same checklist that drinking water or eating food are. The question of whether someone is ready to date or not adds, in my experience, a completely superfluous expectation onto the already loaded plate of someone as they grieve.

The question also assumes that dating after loss, like other activities, will be the same as it was before. Some things, like going to the gym or traveling, feel exactly like they did before he died.

Other things, like dating, do not. Not even close.

I can emphatically say that dating after loss is a completely different ballgame. That makes sense, as we are completely different people.

And if I’m being honest: I really have no idea what I’m meant to be doing or how people do it.

But I do know that if a griever ends up in a new romantic relationship, it has nothing to do with the fact that they “readied” themselves in some way that myself or others have not.

And to be even more honest, it isn’t so much my own readiness that I have found lacking as much as the readiness of others: It seems that many people know how to date and enjoy the fruits that grief has brought into my life, but when it comes to tending to the roots of those blessings…they simply don’t know how or what to do. I end up feeling like I have to show someone flowers I’ve cut from the garden of my life, rather than the actual garden itself.

And I’ll never be ready for a relationship like that; not after what I had with him.

With John, I was witnessed. I was known. And I was loved in light of my past and the wounds I carried into our relationship.

Now that he’s dead, I see that so many people only know how to love people in spite of those things.

And, no matter how much time goes by, even if that means there is not another “til death do us part” kind of love in the years I have left, I’ll never be ready to be loved in a way that feels less true or less good than the way he loved me when he was still here.

A Toast to the Ones We Lost

There’s a certain type of person with a certain type of heart who, before setting out to do something they love, will see the inherent danger, corruption, and uncertainty that they will encounter along the way, and still choose to do it anyways.

This is a toast to them.

They’re the type of people who aren’t “in it” for the glory because they realize that glory isn’t something that can be found, rather it can only be bestowed. So they go, not in search of glory, but with an openness to it. An awareness of it; that it is something that they might glimpse, but never keep.

They’re the type of people who you fall in love with despite the inherent danger and uncertainty of their way of life because, in a world filled with the atrophied spirits of those who live in search of safety and comfort, they somehow are the only ones who ever seemed fully alive.

So when they die, whether it be in a training mishap, or in combat, or because of sickness or suicide, there’s a real sense that we have lost something of which there was already too little of: people like them.

It’s not that ‘only the good die young’ as much as only the good truly seem to be alive in the first place.

That’s why when they die, it is, for a while, impossible to see their death as anything other than a cruelty. To only be able to speak about them and talk about them seems unjust. Until one day, you begin to realize there is a hidden glory in the stories we tell about them.

A kind of glory most people don’t understand, but one that you know they will one day.

Until that day comes, with the pictures, and videos, and messages they left behind, with the stories they wrote on our hearts: we recollect them. And we continue to collect and gather more and more pieces of them which lay hidden in the days, months, and years we have stretching out before us.

And we show people what we can of them, we give them glimpses and flashes of the light which they once shone on us and we trust that people will know it one day: what made them so different. What set them apart. And why they could never be forgotten.

Until that day, we raise a toast to them.

We will remember them and try, impossible as it may be some days, to live with a faith that only their death could bring out of us: a faith which “set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead.”¹

A toast to the ones we lost yet somehow still keep.

¹ Hart, David B. The Doors of the Sea. Eerdmans, 2011.

What I Now Know

I never knew what you saw in me.

When you were alive, there would be moments where I would pull your face close to mine and stare, and you would always laugh it off like it was a joke. At the time I guess I didn’t understand why I was doing it either, but looking back, I think I was trying to make out my reflection in your eyes, as if maybe, if I looked hard enough, I would be able to see myself through them.

But I never could see what you saw.

Others couldn’t either, I don’t think.

I had a past. I had issues and shortcomings. I was unrefined and unfinished.

I used to think that you just chose not to see those things, or that you idealized me so much that you couldn’t see them. I used to think that if you’d been given more time, those parts would have outweighed whatever good you saw in me.

But the longer I’ve had to sit with my grief and the sincere yet imperfected love we had (and still have) the more I can see that you didn’t ignore these things; on the contrary, you saw them all but had the understanding to know that the sum of all of my broken parts added up to a very real and very human person.

So I know now what you saw: You simply saw me.

A person who by the grace of God was called “yours” for a little while.

You saw me as a person weighed down by crosses she couldn’t see herself. A fellow wayward human struggling to shoulder burdens she couldn’t remember picking up and didn’t know how to put down. I would always ask you if I was more a “burden” or a “blessing” but I now know that the burdens, and the sharing of them, were the blessings.

You could see all this, and you helped me carry what you could while you were here because you understood what I didn’t at the time: where I was supposed to be going.

I never understood why you walked with me during the last two years of your life until I got to where you were leading: To the foot of the cross of the One who would help me carry what I simply could not anymore. You were leading me to a place where I would be spoken for throughout eternity.

But you spoke for me here.

Of all the voices I’d heard before you and all the voices I will hear after, nothing will ever change the fact that I was lucky enough to be spoken for on this Earth. By you.

Nothing will ever change the fact that I was lucky to hear my name being called by your voice.

I know this now.

And I also know that your name is still being said by the One who called us into existence to begin with, albeit in a tone and pitch which I cannot perceive. I know it’s still being said though. I know you still exist.

And I know when my time on this Earth is done too, when I, like you, have seen my last birthday, we will once again be a part of the same melody.

Two notes among many in the same song: a song of gratitude, a song of love, a song that will ripple through eternity itself.

On Grief and Holy Saturday

We laid him to rest a few months after he died.

Military funerals take some time to arrange, so I had hoped against hope that the months would give me time to prepare for the finality of what was coming. But looking back on it now, the amount of time between his accident and burial felt more like a time to be endured than a time to live in. The moments blurred and bled into one another making the months feel more akin to one long, drawn out day.

In short: Though time moved forward, I did not.

It was a state of limbo like the dark day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

A Holy Saturday of my own: a state of being neither in the life I knew before nor a life that is to come. And even though I had very little tangible faith back then, I think I largely believed in some sense, that if I lived “nobly” enough or put on a brave face until the funeral, that a God I didn’t really believe in might decide to give him back to me.

I longed for a resurrection I had no right to believe in.

I think this is the state of mind that Joan Didion referred to as “magical thinking.” A state where delusion is the only accessible form of comfort within reach as we scramble to make sense of what came to pass without knowing how to leave it in our past.

The delusions gave way to reality the day of his services, as did any comfort they brought with them.

Any semblance of denial I had been living in was buried with him, and I remember coming home and feeling as if everything inside me had been carved out and replaced with the ground that now lay on top of him. And I finally had to accept that it was over. All the promise of a life with him, and the future that called me into each day was finished. And there would be no more.

In the shadow of this reality, against all rationale and reason, I found myself kneeling beside my bed and struggling against words that were clawing their way out of me from the depths of my spirit.

And I remember pleading: Please…please come back.

The futility of saying these words was not lost on me. I knew the implausibility of the request I was making, and yet I kept speaking these words over and over again…

Please, come back.

Simple words that were drawn from the deepest parts of my heart that slowly poured and cascaded into a flowing litany of lament:

Please. Come back.

This can’t be happening.

Come back.

Because this world is mean and I cannot stand to be here.

Because you were good.

Come back, please.

Because you told me the truth.

Because I could tell you the truth.

Because you would hear it.

I’m begging you: Please, come back now.

Because this hurts.

Because I’m lost. And I don’t know what I’m doing.

Please.

Please. Come back.

Years have gone by since that moment, and in those years I have come to see that those words which rang so empty to me had been ringing in the ears of God since before there was any time for Him to move through. I’ve come to see that He was waiting for the fullness of time and the cries of the disciples on Holy Saturday before He spoke his word back to humanity once and for all.

There’s a kinship in those words between all who have spoken similar ones and the first followers of Christ. There’s a comfort in knowing that I was not the first person to pray a prayer against hope, a prayer asking for the impossible: for the one that we love to come back to us.

I wasn’t the first, and I certainly won’t be the last.

I have very little doubt that the followers of Christ were also not the first people to make such a request of God. They were, however, the first to have their Holy Saturday prayers answered, when on Sunday, if we can bring ourselves to believe such a thing could happen… Jesus rose again.

It is an incredibly difficult thing to believe…that a broken and tortured rabbi was put to death only to rise as a God who is a true light in the darkness. A God who, before the foundations of the Earth were laid, saw that the deepest cries of our heart would pour from the grief and pain of loss and who answered those pleas with his life.

A God who waits in the hell that is Holy Saturday- between tragedy and the resurrection of new life- and walks with us from one side to the other.

A God who is good.

A God who comes back for us.

Who tells us the Truth because He is it.

A God who returns because we are lost, and we don’t know what we are doing.

A God who hears us.

Who knows this world is mean and how we hurt while in it.

A God who “put to death the power death held over us.”

Because He knows the way. Because He is the Way.

Because He is a God who loves us and who does not leave us -not even for a moment- to walk alone.

In Grief’s Silence

There’s a phenomenon that occurs anytime someone finds themself in a foreign land where they do not know or speak the language. Even though it is an uncomfortable stage of acculturation, it’s actually a vital part of becoming a member of a new culture or Way of life.

It’s called “the silent period.”

During this time, a person is inundated with so many unrecognizable sounds and experiences from an unrecognizable culture, that they can’t even make an attempt to articulate what they are experiencing, so they walk around mostly silent. Anytime they do try to speak, they aren’t quite able to convey exactly what they were meaning to, so they retreat back into observing the world around them until the words that they are looking for are within their grasp.

To the outside world, when someone is in their “silent period,” it often looks like they aren’t finding any meaning in their surroundings, but, ironically, they are actually deeply engaged with all that is going on while their eyes, ears, mouth and brain try to put everything together.

Oftentimes when people attempt to rush out of this silent period, they will often misuse words and confuse concepts, but even those mistakes are a crucial part of learning a new language.

People can stay in this silent period for a long time; it is just how humans are. We are able to take in and understand our experiences long before we are able to speak about them meaningfully.

Irregardless of how long we are there, it is necessary to go through this silent period so we can arrive at a stage which is simply referred to as “the home stage:” a stage where the person feels completely settled into a new way of life.

But when the words finally do come, when we are able to articulate what we were taking in for all those months and years, the words often come pouring out like water from a spring that had been lying in anticipation for someone to dig deep enough to find it.

This is how I would describe my experience of being taken to the foreign lands of grief.

I entered into a “silent period” of my own… wandering alone in the deserts for years, acutely aware that things were happening around me, but unable to put them into words. And though I knew deep down that Someone was leading me through this desert, I did not know who or what was walking with me, step by step, to higher and more solid ground.

It’s now when I look back that I can see very clearly where I was and Who I was with: I was the prodigal child wrapped in the arms of her loving Father who was whispering to her all the words she needed to hear but, as of yet, could not understand. I didn’t quite know how to put into words that I was experiencing “being found” because I had never fully been aware that I was ever lost.

So I stayed in that embrace like a suffering patient being held by a doctor who kept whispering over and over in a language she didn’t understand: “you will be made well again. I am making you well.”

The silent stage is different for all people, but we all experience it when we are in a strange and unfamiliar place. And when it comes to the places grief takes us, where all of the signs are indiscernible, and the roads all seem circular, I can understand why I stayed spiritually mute for years while my Father continued to whisper as I suffered in my silence.

But then the words started to come. At first, it was just words and phrases which I would hesitantly and self consciously speak out of my silence…

God.

Is real.

He is for me.

I am his.

The simplest phrases with deep, profound meanings that I could only understand in the silence of my heart. These words, simple as they may be, were enough to illuminate the place where all my wayward missteps and the agony of grief had gotten me: to the foot of The Cross.

And it was only when realizing where I was that the words God had been speaking to me while in His embrace were given to me, and I found myself finally being able to say what I could not before:

That I am the daughter of the Most High King.

That my Father has put to death all that was meant to torment me.

And that death itself, and the grief it leaves in its wake, has been crushed under the weight of The Cross on which my God hangs.

That I will be well.

That all things shall be well.

I found myself saying these words, and I still find myself saying these words as I gaze up at The Cross with a full recognition of what those words mean and why it took me so long to be able to say them and how those words cast a light on the shadowlands of grief.

It took me years of being in my “silent period” to finally get to a place I never knew I was missing but to which I was always being called…

To finally get me home.

And So I Tell Your Story

When I was eighteen, my aunt gave me a copy of her favorite book: a small parable about the love of flight.

It was a thin volume that contained a simple yet deep story which had, over the course of her life, become increasingly important to her because the person who had given it to her, my grandfather, had loved it very much. In fact, he had been the one who passed the book on to her.

And she, years after he died, shared it with me.

And when I met you, I couldn’t help but think of how much you reminded me of the central character in that book. I remember telling you about it during the first few weeks that our own story began to unfold.

In fact, that book, and the story it contained, was my first gift to you. And when I handed it to you, I couldn’t help but feel that the love of my grandfather’s original gift was somehow living on.

That’s what happens when a good story is passed on: it honors and brings to mind the person responsible for originally sharing it. The story my grandfather left our family decades ago, to this day, remains a gift.

And in that same way, six years ago, when God started writing the story of you and I, it too became a story worth sharing.

And I do share it. Constantly.

That story, our story, I flip and read through it so often in my head, and I speak of it so much, that I sometimes worry that, over the course of time, some of the details will eventually fade away or distort. Or that some of the pages will be loosened from their binding and possibly be lost or lose their meaning.

I worry that our story will become so worn out, that there will be days, weeks, months, and even years where I won’t even think to reach for it, because I’ll begin to believe that a story that was lived so long ago couldn’t possibly have anything new to offer anyone. Even myself.

I worry about these things every time someone asks me how long I plan to let your loss define me.

And to be honest, I’m not sure how long defining moments in our lives are allowed to keep defining us. I’m not sure they ever actually stop?

What I do know though is that lament and the telling of the stories of our dead is in our bones.

In fact, for thousands of years, in countless civilizations, the stories of the dead so strongly rattled in the bones of those who loved them, that their grief would pour loudly onto city streets. Displays of lament became so disruptive that eventually laws were put into place in an effort to contain them. Grief was viewed as something to be done out loud; a “discourse of pain” between humans in the throes of mourning and the throne room of God. In some places, the real tragedy was a death that was left unnoticed, unmourned, and “unscreamed.”

The stories of our dead were always meant to be told – to be shared – and so I share yours. I share your story with others so others can then share theirs with me: A call and response about people we love. A growing song of lament.

I share your story because, when I do, the One who wrote it knows that His gift was good.

And you were a good story… a beautiful one. Albeit, one with too few chapters.

And though I would have written your story very differently… And though I sobbed, tore at my skin, and pleaded at God’s feet that you should be granted a longer one: as time has gone on, I am beginning to see that I could not have actually written it any better.

And so I tell it. As it was and as it is.

I speak of your story, which like the one I got from my aunt decades ago, was a gift whose importance I could never have conceived of when it was first, from God’s hands, placed into mine.

On Falling Stars

I told you my favorite constellation once.

It was when we first met, and you were telling me about the place you lived and how the skies got so dark over there, that you could see more stars than you had ever seen before in your life.

I remember asking you if you could see Cassiopeia, a constellation of five stars that formed the outline of a queen who was trapped on her throne. I remember telling you that I always found myself looking for her in the skies.

I’m not sure what it was about that specific arrangement of stars that always spoke to me, but I guess there was something about the image of someone being helplessly spun around as the world turned beneath her that seemed, in a way, relatable.

The world always appeared to me as it must have to Cassiopeia: swirling and unstable with no fixed horizon in sight. I guess I saw myself in her…a constellation that could only be made sense of from light years away, here on Earth.

I imagine that the five stars that make her up have no idea that they are a part of a larger story which can only be seen with the perspective of someone far away and far removed from them. I doubt the stars understand that each of them play a role in giving the other four stars meaning and purpose. I doubt they know they are a crucial part of a cosmic pattern that appears random when up close, but from a distance, makes more sense than it has any reason to.

I imagine each star in Cassiopeia thinks itself to be alone and purposeless with no idea that there are other stars, just like them, depending on their light and existence to make sense of their own.

And that’s when I think of you, and I wonder if that’s what it was like for you when you died. I wonder if you were able to see the light and sense you brought to the world and the people who knew you.

I imagine you, like the stars within a constellation, could not begin to comprehend how many people depended on your life and the light it brought to make sense of their own lives. How could someone possibly see or perceive the vital role they play in the configuration of other people’s lives while they are living their own?

I can’t speak for others, but I know for me, when you died, it was as if someone extinguished one of the five stars in Cassiopeia.

What was once a recognizable and stable pattern was now randomness and chaos. With you gone, I could no longer make out the form of my own life. There was no girl. There was no throne. And there was no longer an Earth spinning beneath her.

I can only imagine how many people felt the same way; people who hadn’t spoken to you in years, who had lives that had expanded far beyond the stretch of sky they met you in, were left broken and grasping to reclaim a sense of self that was inexplicably shaken by your death.

We can’t see it from here. Our importance. Our role. I don’t think you could see it when you were alive.

But I have hope that you can see it now.

I hope that is a part of the joys of Heaven, or wherever you may be: that you can see what we don’t have the perspective or distance to see until we’re gone. I hope you can see the lights of the people who loved you being moved into new constellations, new patterns, and new creations that had no reason to exist when you were still here with us.

I don’t know where you live now, but I hope that if it has dark skies, you will be able to see what none of us down here can. I don’t know what the skies of Heaven look like, but I hope we are the stars you see.

And I hope that you can make me out from where you are and that you can see that I’m transfigured into a new constellation; one that you are still a part of somehow. I hope you can see that I’ve found solid ground to stand on and a fixed horizon to gaze at.

And I hope you can feel it in your soul, like I can feel it in mine, that you were the falling star that led me straight to it.

On Dying Wounded

There are cuts and wounds so deep and irregular that doctors, in an effort to close them, have no choice but to extend them outwards. Ironically, elongating a wound, well past the boundaries of the original trauma, sometimes is the only way to ensure it has a chance to heal properly.

I found myself thinking about this yesterday.

I was at work and was letting my mind wander while revisiting the moments that had stitched the day together, and somewhere between one thought ending and another beginning, a memory of you crept in.

And for the first time in months, I felt that familiar tug.

It wasn’t a feeling of pain… more a feeling of tension. And for a moment, it was as if every memory of you was being pulled taut, almost to the point of breaking.

It was kind of like the sensation of a suture repeatedly being pulled through a numbed laceration.

And in that moment, I just needed to hear your voice. Your voice was the only thing I could think of that could slacken what was being pulled tight somewhere inside me.

I guess that is the very nature of the wounds we leave on others after we die, John. (That’s the nature of the ones you left behind on me, at least.)

The gashes grief left in me are deeply irregular; they’re like the wounds surgeons struggle to close. And, even three years later, I can’t seem to find a way to get the lacerated ends to fit back neatly again. And so they get tugged on and pulled as I attempt to move forward.

And yesterday I got to thinking that, maybe, this is also why the hand of God, in all Its wisdom, takes the borders of grief and extends them outward. Just like the doctors that model themselves after Him, He seems to elongate the wounds of grief far past the boundaries of where anyone would believe they should go. And maybe…maybe that’s why grief lasts so long: because the worst injuries, whether they are spiritual or physical, require extension before they can be sutured and healed.

Maybe what seems to be the cruelest facet of grief, its duration, is actually an act of divine mercy. Maybe the pain we feel long after people die is a necessary elongation so that our wounds may be mended properly.

I guess that’s why we feel the sting of someone’s death until we die ourselves?

And maybe the end of life is finally when the broken edges that continued to tug and pull and grow taut will finally be closed over with a final stitch.

That might be what death is: the final tug as God removes the threads that bound what always hurt, but never healed.

Maybe that’s how it works? I’m not quite sure, honestly.

I guess all I am sure of is that I will die wounded. All of us will.

And all I can do is pray that when my eyes close for the last time, that I will find you John. That I will find you at the end of the wounds you left behind.

On Finding Love Again

I treated love as a trivial thing before I met you, John.

I always believed people could will themselves into thinking they loved one another. And that loving someone, just like anything subjected to the trials of time, eventually turned into habitual duty.

Before we met, I had a pattern:

I would spend a few months going out with friends, meeting new people, and eventually, I would find someone I figured I could will myself to love. After careful assessment of the person and an attempt to weigh the pros and cons of being with them, I would declare to myself that, yes…I can love this person.

And I’d tell them I loved them. And when they told me they loved me, I’d say it right back to them.

And when we would break up, I would call up a friend and cry into the phone and say, “…but I loved him.”

And then a few months later, I would start going out with friends, meeting new people…and the cycle would repeat.

That’s the pattern I lived out for most of my life.

That was love to me for most of my life: a lukewarm melodrama I could manifest after acting out a recycled pattern of choices that seemed to always work. And I never understood how, if this was love, anyone could will themselves into loving someone enough that something like marriage or long term partnership would ever actually work.

But then, John… I met you.

And for the first time, love wasn’t a decision that I needed to will myself to make.

Loving you wasn’t a choice…it was more a reality that I was asked to accept. A reality that something outside of myself was urging and willing me towards: I was simply going to love you deeply whether I wanted to or not.

But I wanted to love you. And I did, John. I absolutely loved you.

I loved you so much, in fact, that I was angry that I had ever used the word before with anyone else.

I could see it for the first time: how the alchemy between two people could have such a charge to it, that an actual lifetime together wasn’t merely an option as much as a foregone conclusion. Something you’d be crazy not to want to try.

For the first time, my fear of the future was muted.

You would always tease me about that fear and the misguided vanity that it flowered from. You always thought it was silly that I feared how time would change the shape of my body, my face, and ultimately, would change the way you saw me. I was always so scared of that.

And I don’t think I ever told you this when you were alive, but right before you died, I realized that I was wrong. Not about time changing the way I looked, but about thinking that time could actually change the way you saw me.

John, I know now, that in your eyes…I was never going to age.

I loved you. More than my own desire to be happy.

And something about what you did to my heart, whatever you were able to pour into it, felt like the whispers of something eternal.

John, after spending so much of my time on this Earth searching for life and clinging to anyone or anything I met along the way that might have an idea where to find it: I met you. I was willed to do so.

And there was nowhere else to go after that. So I stayed where I was, and we got two years together. And then God took you back.

We got two years, John.

It’s almost a laughably short amount of time to most people down here on Earth, but I don’t think most people know what two years with you can do to a person’s heart.

And what did that time do to it?

Did it break it? Absolutely.

Teach it? Yes.

But most importantly: That time showed my heart that it was something worth cherishing. That it was something good.

And then when you died, I was left with it.

That heart you’d spent the last years of your life speaking goodness into tried as hard as it could to keep beating.

And right around that time you’d been dead for two years, I found myself wondering how, on this Earth, I was supposed to give this heart you left me with to anyone else.

But I tried.

I tried my old patterns: to will myself into finding someone to love with this heart that you shaped.

I went on dates, John. I even allowed myself to get swept up in new romances a few times. And I’d find myself doing the same things I’d done with you, and having inside jokes, and waking up genuinely excited to have someone to talk to.

But the love inside still had nowhere real to go.

And I kept thinking to myself, “he would want me to love again…” And people would tell me that in order to honor you, “I should find someone to love again,” until finally it occurred to me that maybe I should just ask you where you wanted what you left in my heart to go.

And (through the grace of God) I heard you say:

Babe, of course I want you to find love again.

In fact, I want you to find it everywhere. And in everyone. (Even in the people you don’t like) And even more so in the people who have hurt you. And if you find a person or a place where there is very little goodness…pour my goodness there.

And love? Find it. Find it everywhere that I’m not.

So I’ve been doing that, John. I’ve been wringing my heart out like a sponge on other people’s hurt, especially hurt I’ve caused. And in the lives of our friends. And in the lives of my students.

And, at times, I worry there will be nothing left in it.

But in those memories I have with you, and in the words you spoke to me, and in the hands of the God you led me to, I find all the places that I can go to fill it back up with what is good.

And with this heart you left in me, I go out into this world you left me in, and I find love again, and again, and again.

And I’ll keep doing so.

****

(Until our hearts beat together once more, John, I will keep following that will that got me to you)

A Year in the Life of a Pilot’s Widow

I want to start off by addressing that I don’t really know why I am writing this right now, other than the fact that I have something to say to anyone who has or will ever mourn a pilot. I’m going to keep this short, and I’m going to keep it concise…

Before I get into that, I want to talk about what it means to love a pilot. Not a person who flies. But a pilot. Someone who was born to take to the skies.

I have heard so many military spouses talk about how they simply pretend the jobs our husbands and boyfriends have are “normal.” They pretend that they are bankers or lawyers. I get that this is done to protect themselves, but ultimately, they aren’t bankers. They are pilots.

Their jobs are epic. They have legendary stories to tell.

If you love a pilot, you love someone who pretty much tames and rides dragons all day. And then comes home and does laundry. And eats dinner with you. And asks about your day.

If you love a pilot this means weekly if not daily conversations about the dangers of the job. The dangers of ejection. The possibility of severed limbs. Third degree burns. Broken backs. And death.

Not just one conversation, but many conversations.

If you love a pilot, you love someone who spends their whole life fighting gravity, and bending it. And to love a pilot means that one day, you very realistically may have to mourn that pilot, because even the greatest pilots can die doing what they love.

It’s the gig. To truly love a pilot is to be ready and willing and able to try your best to survive their death.

And when and if, one day, your pilot falls from the sky, we, their widows, are left to mourn heroes.

We are also left with a community who says they want to support your grief but also really hopes you stay quiet about it.

When you mourn a pilot, everyone mourns with you for a while. You get a lot of calls from people who didn’t know your pilot but want to express their condolences.

You also get messages from pilots you don’t know. Their wives in the next room. These pilots are panicked, they have so much fear of death, but their wife simply can’t understand and so they can’t talk to her. (Maybe because she is trying to convince herself that he has a normal job and he doesn’t want to upset her).

So these pilots talk to you. Because you’re already destroyed.

And though you are broken and grieving, these are your person’s brothers, so you stay up til all hours of the night trying to console broken men while you yourself are broken.

When you mourn a pilot, you know conversations are going on about you in the spouse groups. Are you still a spouse? Most think yes. But there’s always one or two who consider you less of a spouse, and after a few months of trying to figure out how to deal with their passive aggressive dismissals of your suggestions, you decide that maybe, ultimately, you may need to leave that group completely. And leave those friendships.

A lot of people tell you that they’re going to do really amazing things to honor your dead pilot. Getting necklaces made. Bracelets. They’re going to send them to you when the designs are finished…but the designs never get finished, and ultimately you just forget about it.

When you mourn a pilot, you listen to other spouses with living husbands complain about the amount of time their guy is flying. They don’t complain in group chats…they, for some reason, complain to you.

You get called by investigators over and over and over again. Every time, they need a little more information. A few more details for the report. And then the report of the accident comes out, and you read “pilot error,” listed across the top. And your soul screams. And you feel like your guy has died twice.

And on top of that, people keep saying over and over and over again, “I’m sure his last thoughts were of you,” and you want to scream at them, “do you even get it? Do you even understand what they do up there? He better not have been thinking of me, he better have been trying to get out of the god damn airplane so he could get back to me.”

When you mourn a pilot, you show up to their final funeral service, and you see people with their cell phones out.

You collapse by their coffin afterwards when everyone is trickling away and you sob. And you clutch the name tag hanging from the handle of the casket and you look at your dead pilot’s name. And you feel your heart shatter again.

And while that’s happening, someone walks up behind you and taps you on the shoulder and asks if you can move for a second…because they want a picture of the casket (it’s their first time at Arlington Cemetery after all, and they don’t know if they’ll ever be back).

So you move. And they get their picture.

And at the services, you run into one of the pilots who called you months earlier. And later on after the funeral, he calls you again when it is a little too late. He’s alone in his hotel room. He asks if you want to meet up. And you hang up the phone and delete his number. And you mourn your dead pilot even more because he was truly a good person. And you feel like you’ve been left to the wolves.

When you mourn a pilot you consider the idea that maybe you don’t want to live anymore. You make the mistake of telling one of the wives. And she takes the screenshots of those messages and shows them to other wives. And ultimately one of them finally calls you and goes, “I just think you should know she is saying these things about you,” and you stare blankly off into space and ask her, “did you stand up for me?” To which she responds, “well, it’s not really my place to do so, but I thought you should know.”

And so you think about it.

And you make a list of every single person from your pilot’s squadron, and you delete them from social media. And you write really angry posts about things they never let you say. And you’re talking for the first time, honestly, about how you feel. And you let it all out. You use your anger to scorch the Earth around you. And it feels good.

People start calling you and telling you you’re causing too much pain to others. And you laugh to yourself that anyone is trying to talk to you about what “too much pain,” is. And it feels good.

The fact that people can see, for the first time, how little they mean to you in the face of what you lost, feels good. It feels so good, because you finally, after almost a year, feel like people hear you.

And the first year ends. And you’re finally breathing again after spending so much time suffering a death by a thousand cuts.

And you take your first few steps into the second year of being a dead pilot’s widow.

And then another pilot dies. And you see his widow in the news articles and you hear the talks and lofty speeches about how the community is going to pull together to support her.

And you just hope it goes differently this time.