When in crisis, we all have a tendency to turn inward. Yet, as I considered just a month an a half ago, you – or rather, we – are not alone. I committed myself, at the end of my last post, in this way:
“Personally, I will give myself time and space to heal. To process. I will exchange stories with others about the loss that they feel in the days following this election. And, as I do so, respecting my feelings of loss, anger, and despair, I will begin to rebuild. I will not let my heart be hardened. Rather, in time, I will lay my broken, aching heart open. Open to the beauty and new life that comes after loss.” (emphasis added)
How I need that promise again today.
A month an a half later and I need replace only “in the days following this election” with a different, new loss. Despite the deep personal losses of the last year, including the death of my oldest daughter Eliana, the losses kept coming, this time in a way all too familiar. I could not have imagined when I wrote those words how much I would need them. Just two weeks ago, Chris and I lost our second child, Ava Ruth, at seventeen weeks. Our precarious joy quickly dissipated despite the holiday cheer and promise of the birth of the redeeming Christ child. With two daughters now “lost” I never felt more alone. The aloneness stirred up feelings of failure — we failed as parents (who loses two children in one year?), and we were failed by nature, mocked by the healthy babies and pregnancies that are becoming ubiquitous in our midst, but not in our own lives.
Our world became even smaller in the blink of an eye for we had been struck by the gods of poor luck twice now. (Ava, like her sister, had a different, yet rare, genetic disease.) It was beginning to feel a lot less random, and I quickly felt like a stranger even among those parents who had faced the horror of losing one child, simply because they didn’t lose two.
And yet the shock, the grief, the grasping for an answer only to find silence, all of it felt all too familiar. We’d been here before — why, oh why God, were we here again? I found myself searching for answers to the never-ending stream of questions that flooded, overcame, arrested me — were we going to be able to have any children? did we cause this? if so, how can we fix it — how can we prevent it? how long do we have to wait to try again? did God cause this? why didn’t God fix this? Why us? Were we duped again? What is the meaning of all of this?
Though my search for answers to these questions has proven, largely, fruitless, I have stumbled upon a few things that have given me comfort, and reminded me that the darkness too can yield a bounty. For me, it’s a reminder, again that we are not alone. And, that knowing that is enough for now.
One place I have found comfort is in the call of Buddhist teacher and monk Thich Nhat Hanh to “look deeply” — to both focus on the present and, at the same time, to see that the universe is so much bigger than the ever-changing moments in which we live. (See No Death, No Fear (public library).) When I am unable to make sense of the deaths of my girls, I find comfort in the not knowing. I am comforted by a belief that there is an “unfolding” of my life and theirs that is bigger than me, bigger than my abilities to understand at this moment. This is different from the empty platitudes that people say to make sense of death or loss (that “God has a plan” or “God needed his angels”); rather, it is an acknowledgement that what I understand about life and death now is, I believe, a drop in the bucket to all there is to understand. The universe is bigger than me.
Another place I have found comfort is in the biographies of men and women who have lived (and died) before me. I spent the week recovering reading Galileo’s Daughter (public library) by Dava Sobel in which Sobel traces Galileo’s known and daring scientific exploits, including his gradual affirmation of the Copernican system, alongside the quiet and everyday unfolding of Galileo’s life. This book, and others like it, in which the years pass with only a few page turns and the joys and losses of people’s lives span paragraphs, reassure me that my feelings of loss and despair are not unique to me. Loss is as common as joy. It is part of the human condition. And this path I walk has been forged by so many before me, and will be followed by others after me. In addition, Galileo’s public recognition of the Copernican system, which was a daring challenge to the then-widely-held belief that the Earth was the center of the universe, begs the question what do we take for granted as truth, what is our Ptolemaic system of today? The account of Galileo’s life reminds me not just that we are not alone, but, too, that there is so much we have yet to understand.
Finally, I have found comfort in the brave voices of mothers and fathers who have stood in our shoes — those parents who have had to make the hardest of parenting decisions without any of the fun, who have had to find and make meaning in the lives that could have been, should have been, but weren’t, who have weighed their own pain and suffering at the loss of a child against that of their own child’s and chosen to endure the suffering themselves, who have lost more than one child, who have been brave enough to try again. Their stories are mine, and mine theirs.
And yet.
And yet, the raw vulnerability of this time draws me inward to the darkest of places where I am utterly alone. I am drawn into these dark places of sleeplessness, silent terror, self-pity and self-critique. And I do not want to see the light. I do not want to rest in the promise of a new day, a mask to the unpredictability of this life, which shares equally in joy and sorrow. I do not want to hope for a better tomorrow, to trust in time’s unfolding, which will be more beautiful and joy-filled, more shocking and sorrowful, than I can ever imagine. I want to feel this aloneness. I want to be stuck for a little while.
So I close myself off. I belittle myself and the person that I have become this last year. I push my husband away. I imagine living this year on my own, without any contact with family or friends.
And yet.
My husband holds me ever closer. The texts, emails, phone calls, and house visits containing words of comfort continue to come from my family and friends. We make plans to see each other. And though I howl with despair, shuttering and giving in to the emptiness I feel within me, my dog Ruby kisses my tears away, transforming my cries to laughter. Despite my best efforts to forget it, to turn my back on life and love and laughter, to give the finger to God and all that God creates and makes beautiful, new, and good in this life, there is always someone knocking, gently, at my door.
“Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible. Life itself is possible,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh. No Death, No Fear (New York: Riverhead Books 2002), 39. We carry on, and try to hold the joy with the sorrow, in each present moment, knowing that this too, this time of belly-aching laughter, of heart-wrenching despair, whatever “this” is, this too shall pass.
We all share the vulnerability that impermanence brings. We just don’t realize it until it manifests through the death of a loved one, a relationship, a job, a home. We are not alone because we all share this vulnerability, we all experience impermanence. We all can share in both the joys and sorrows of each other’s lives because they mirror those in our own.
At some point in your life you will be in that dark place. You may be there right now. My hope for you, for all of us, is that at some point in your life, too, you will be the one at the door, knocking gently, reminding the person on the other side — you are loved, you are not alone.