Tag Archives: Faith

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.

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 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)