Your Daily Miracle: Vocation

The wind blows strong tonight, whistling in the chimney, beating the windowpanes with rain.  Our lights have flickered several times, but so far the Christmas tree still glows.  I wonder if the tree wishes she were outside, bowing beneath the gale, or is she resigned and a bit happy even to be here, snug and calm in our house, all her needles unstirred?


Today was a better day.  The dread that I have been awakening with, that has been dogging my footsteps, had blown away when I opened my eyes this morning.  Certainly it helped that Elspeth was sleeping beside me, recovering from a bad dream; and as the morning wore on and I slapped my alarm clock quiet for the third time, Bea joined us as well, snuggling in, hugging my arm to her.  The day was peopled from beginning to end, and that was lovely, too.


I think the hardest thing will be learning how to be okay by myself.  It's something I've worked on over the years, and I thought I had it mastered.  How to be alive and happy and contented all alone--tales of a recovering extrovert.  Now silence requires work, and solitude requires that I guard my thoughts and heart.  That sucks.


Funny, I never say that word, but as I wrote a letter to my friend Sal recounting the nightmares of the past few weeks, I found myself writing in bigger and bigger letters scrawling it across the page, THIS SUCKS.  And it does.  It feels good to admit it.  It's taken me this many days to get past shock and regret and denial to be able to say out loud that what happened, that what is continuing to happen, is a total and complete pain.  That it shouldn't be this way.  That I wish it could have been different but it's not and here we are, trying to go on with life when it feels like something sacred and important and loved was shattered.


You know what sucks?  It sucks that I don't feel like eating, that it's hard to concentrate on what another person is saying to me.  It sucks that my heart races sometimes.  It sucks most that my pain is only a small reflection of the pain of others.  That there are so many pieces for people to pick up, and those people are in pain.


People have encouraged me to be angry, and I suppose I am, but I can't be angry at my friend, though I've definitely opened myself up to that possibility.  I am angry at the disease that wore her down.  It wasn't supposed to be this way.


Listen, you who are feeling the pain: please find time to nurture yourselves.  Accept grace.  Let it pour over you.  It's the only way.


This is what happened to me yesterday. I was so lonely and so sad and so hungry but unable to go into the kitchen and make myself something to eat.  It's been dark here, the kind of dark that makes you wonder if you ever woke and got out of bed or if it's time to crawl back under the covers.  I stared at my phone.  I didn't feel like calling anyone.  I hate to bother anyone with the same old thing I've been saying for hours every day, out loud or to myself.  But I've got some sense, even when I'm miserable, so I got in my car and I drove to my friend's house, and she invited me in.  And insisted that I stay for tea.  And then pathetically and self-consciously, I asked for a piece of sandwich bread.  And this tiny little lady suddenly filled the whole kitchen with her loving, nurturing presence.  She began bustling around the kitchen and filling a bowl with black beans and finding me really nice bread and buttering it and the reality that someone was looking after me was so wonderful and sweet that I just started blubbering in her kitchen and drooling and crying into her hair.  She nestled me into her couch and lit a candle and read me Christmas poetry, good poetry, sweet poetry, and then I started talking and couldn't stop.


She gave me some very good advice as my black beans grew cold. "Your friend is in good hands," she said.  "She doesn't need you to take care of her anymore.  God is there with her, taking care of her.  Now what you need to do is accept grace."  Then she said, "You can be angry if you want.  The anger won't hurt her.  It's not pretty, necessarily, but your friend would want you to feel any way you can in order to get through this."


I looked at her in some astonishment.  It was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment.  Oh my heavens, the woman speaks the truth.  It was so simple and so freeing to realize that I can rise up out of this misery and shout if I need to.  It's not fair.  It's not fair.  Feeling free to say that gives me more energy than the endless regret--which is like getting lost in a maze, where I keep coming around the same corner, where I keep running into emptiness and despair.


You know what I don't regret?  I don't regret knowing her or loving her.  There is no greater privilege than to share each other's journeys.  It's what makes life worth living.  God, it is so risky.  But there is no greater joy.


Merry and I agreed last week through many tears that we would love and know her and share our lives with her again in a minute.  She enriched our lives in countless ways.  And her legacy to our family will be one of life, of creativity, of love and generosity.  I shake my fist at the darkness and I shout it out loud.  Thank you, girl, for sharing your life with us.  Thank you for drinking tea with me.  Thank you for clearing my table, for loving my daughters, for stacking my dishwasher.  Thank you for planting marigolds in my garden, for dumping that dead raccoon rotting in front of our house into the dumpster when we were trying to sell our house.  Thank you for taking my girls to the park.  Thank you for pushing them on the swings.  Thank you for laughing in our house, for the blessing that brought.  Thank you for sharing your thoughts and your emotions and your struggles with us.  Thank you for your quiet love that upheld us so many times when we were busy or worried or beaten by injustice.  Thank you.  You kick-ass, fabulous woman.  We love you.


When it comes right down to it, oh, my, we are just humans in this world.  We are just doing our best, which is sometimes not as good as we'd like it be.  We are all making mistakes and bungling through, and if we can find some good people to love and to be loved by, then we are so blessed.  Tonight I give thanks for tea, for my family, for my friends.  For my sister who bought me a great big cottage pie at the pub, and we ate it all, and who watches my kids, and who upholds me in so many ways.  I give thanks for my friend and her couch and poetry and black beans and sound advice.  I give thanks for so much--the wind beating the world clean outside, Pride and Prejudice to watch tonight, the glow of my trusty computer screen and my fingers that loose thoughts from my mind and give me relief.  I give thanks for a God who turns no one away, who fills my cup even when I'm not aware that it's running over, always, over the rim, over my hands, onto the ground at my feet.  I give thanks for the ability to feel anger and to shout it; the ability to cry and to laugh; the coming of Christmas, the strength that I feel returning to me, saying that we will be okay, and that life will go on and be all of good and bad and miserable and lovely and beautiful--all of those things, because we are just people, all of us--but that joy will always be close, right next to me, curled beside me, waiting for me to wake and find it there.