Tag Archives: healing

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.

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 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)