Tag Archives: jesus

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.

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 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.  

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.