Tag Archives: Suffering

Get Over This All Over Again

August 2, 2019 By in Daily WP, Thirty-Nine Stories Tags: , , , Leave a comment

At Starbucks at a small square table by the third floor window. From here I can watch foot traffic. I can see houses built close together up a hill. Yesterday I was here to draft in my notebook. Today I came to draft on my laptop but when I arrived, taking this table away from the ac vent, not under a speaker, I sat unmoving for a long time, thinking about how my own suffering affects my husband and children. Since mid January my left knee has swollen every other week. An exhausting cycle. In June an MRI confirmed cartilage damage, a nearly healed bone bruise. I quit walking in the mornings. I continued physical therapy exercises. I cut sugar from my diet. But the pattern holds. In June, the doctor prescribed medication with the caution to take the little pills only for a little while, and only when needed. The anti-inflammatory probably eats my stomach lining. So I took the pills to reduce swelling. The swelling did not reduce. I took the pills when I had no swelling, thinking to stave off the next round of swelling, but the swelling came. I quit the pills and the swelling was on schedule, no better or worse.

When my knee is swollen I must be more cautious. I am slower. I usually wake to weep before I carry on with the day ahead. Sometimes I think of chopping my leg at mid thigh or taking a hammer to my kneecap. This injury is healing. The mystery of such an exact pattern of swelling is what walks me along the line of despair, a small fear at my neck that I am somehow making this happen to my body, that my mind is fucking my joint, because the injury should be healed now with the rest/ medication/ pt exercise/ ice and heat therapy/ rest/ more rest/ fasting/ other dietary changes/ prayer/ rest.

I ask the Holy Spirit to renew my mind. I think about the net of fascia the length of my body, the kinks in my nerves, knots in my muscles. Heal my body. I wonder if I am supposed to be magic about this suffering. Like once I knock out the right ratio of hope and joy in the middle of suffering, perhaps then my body will release itself to heal. I miss the cadence and breathing of a morning run, and the work of my body, the sweat and calm after. But I really miss the ease of a day. When I make plans now I count out the days to know my swollen knee might make the walk difficult – it isn’t really the walk that is difficult at all, only the effort of keeping a plan, the effort of keeping on. I am tired of thinking that this must be the last time my knee swells. This must be it. This time for sure. 

I am not healed yet. I will heal but I am the middle of not healed yet. Maybe I am at the middle end of not healed. Maybe in a month I will wake up and not weep because my whole being will just know this particular light momentary affliction is over. That is what I am like – I have these moments of clarity when I know the shift in my body or mind, when I can recognize an end or beginning, when a truth settles. 

This healing is not for my own body only. Justin reminds me nothing is wasted. I think I could take the mind or the body but both at once is a bit much. And both at once is wearing on my family. We make a joke of it but I cooked a dozen times since January, and when Claire said she missed family dinners like what I used to make, I bought box macaroni and cheese: this is not a joke. This is terrible. I keep thinking I will unearth old motivation. I make myself do things now. I make up reasons why it matters that I keep doing things. This summer I spent seventy dollars on board games, an aspirational purchase for the winter evenings ahead when we’ll sit around the table playing a game and eating popcorn. This summer I also burrowed under a blanket and told Justin I was tired of trying and now I want to try not trying at all. 

Claire looked at me the other day and told me I wasn’t fine, that I didn’t need to pretend I was fine. But she wants me to be fine. I want me to be fine. Yet we live with a weird dichotomy. I am fine and not fine. Today I am asking the Spirit can I please be okay where I am? Can I be okay even if my body continues to disappoint? Can I have peace before I ask? I do not need to be pleased with my circumstance to accept how it may work my body and mind for my good and God’s glory and to ask for that, at least: do what must be done to make me more of who I am in Christ. Any day, situation, relationship shapes me. So this too. So this too!

Yet. Now I am thinking what to do for my husband and kids if this goes on for much longer. Both children expressed they miss me on family ventures around the city. My knee is stable enough I can go along, but slowly. The slowness frustrates me. But Justin and the kids love me enough to walk alongside, slowly. I would rather try not trying. I would rather hide in a darkened room. Points earned for going to the park or making a meal are not adding up to what I want and there is my mistake, thinking that once my knee heals and I can move through the day with ease, then everything will be okay. It is true that I will feel better when my body is healed: I will move again, my brain will welcome endorphins with sweet relief. Probably I will sleep better. Likely I will spend fewer hours staring out a window. And it is true that my family will feel better when I am healed: imagine me making crepes just because, or trekking Seoul Forest with the kids while Justin takes a home day. But I don’t really want to wait until my body heals for all of us to be over this suffering. 

It’s like I have to transcend this shit. Quit playing if. If my body were healed I would have gone for a run this morning, come home and kissed the kids while I was still hot and sticky from the humidity, stood in a cool shower, dressed without thinking what pants still fit. We would have left the apartment twenty or thirty minutes later than we did because I could have kept a walking pace. I might have googled “best brunch in Itaewon” and found a new cafe to try while the kids went to VBS, or I would have walked to our old favorite cafe down the hill, or hiked up the hill to a trendy spot for a Dutch cold brew served with a square of dark chocolate. Now I would be walking back to church to pick up the kids. I’d have drafted the story I woke up thinking about, instead of staring at the sidewalk below, or the shops across the way. If my body were healed I would hop on my bike when we get home this afternoon and head to Shinsegae for dumplings because Grant and I have been craving dumplings. And after we’d all head outside for a warm evening stroll and ice cream. I would go to bed expecting another lovely, uncomplicated day tomorrow. 

Tomorrow I will wake up and have to get over this all over again. But I want to do more than get over the suffering and through the day. I want this middle to not feel like a waste of ticking days until I get to the part where I don’t have to pep talk myself in the bathroom, whispering that I am okay, this is okay, I belong here now. I love the people near me, dearly. I ask the Spirit for joy in my heart. The mercy of this year has been that joy hasn’t gone completely dark. I want more though. I want a ridiculous portion of joy. I want to know better how to love my family. I want my husband and children to be okay even while I am not. But God I want to be okay too. I want to know better that the process matters, that this long wait to heal my body and mind is part of healing my body and mind. There is no way to end this. 

Twenty-two of thirty-nine. More wandering than I prefer. 1486 words. There are ideas here I want to say the right way, like the weird dichotomy, like wanting me to be better not just because I will directly (finally, gladly) benefit, but because I also feel terribly about the burden my suffering is for others. No glamour in this, just the shit of it. And my desperate holy reach for the Spirit to move.

One Day I’ll Write When I’m Through

May 7, 2018 By in Process, Revision Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A couple of months ago I sent out an essay titled “The Grave Garden” and a couple of weeks ago the essay was rejected for publication. I started writing the essay three years ago and tacked on the latest expansion earlier this year. The piece wanders. As it is, the essay is what I first supposed it might be, written only for me. I started writing about the death of infant Kaiden, my friends’ firstborn, and the years after when I was surprised by how sad and angry I remained. I remember writing the first draft. Parts were jagged, like you might snag on an inappropriate observation or emotion.

Right now I’m not certain why I committed that first draft to a file. I was already writing about the Senger family, their loss and second son, the community that walked alongside. Their grief would surface in me throughout that first year after Kaiden died, but what also came was the anger I wanted better to understand. What I’ve noticed about my more personal essays is that anything I finally type is something I’ve written by hand before, more than once. I love Natalie Goldberg’s idea that writers compost their ideas, turning over the soil until it’s rich enough to grow the right words. “The Grave Garden” essay as it is, even called finished, is likely one more part of the compost, one more turn of the soil until I know just how to talk about

what I really want to say, which is:

(I just spent ten minutes rewording a few sentences to whittle the years of this lesson to something that makes me seem more wise than ugly). Let’s try this again:

I didn’t want to be a mom more than anything in the world. And when I watched Christie, a woman who wanted to be a mom more than anything in the world, grieve the death of her son, her loss underscored the gain I held. I condemned myself for not wanting motherhood, for having to work so hard at enjoying the role, for the effort of love.

Before Kaiden died I wrote a couple of essays about contentment. Envy, comparison and finding contentment. I like to believe I really was on the way to figuring out how to enjoy motherhood, all by myself. I ran, journaled, listened to podcast sermons, laid on the floor to pray, confessed, begged for joy. I was too good at recognizing my lack. If I’d been a little dumber or kinder to myself, I probably wouldn’t have worried my initial fear or ambivalence about parenting meant always and forever selfishness. Also before Kaiden died, my parents’ neighbor Rose died weeks after a cancer diagnosis, leaving her husband and eight year old son. Rose’s death shocked my apathy toward marriage and parenting. I was writing a lot about how much a fight it is to just be where you are, to yield to the difficult and boring work of loving a husband and small children, when Rose was diagnosed. Without knowing it, she celebrated her last Christmas. Without knowing it, she welcomed her last new year. And she would not see spring. The morning I learned Rose died, I stood in the shower crying for her son, but also crying for her because no matter the frame of faith and a better place, she was missing out on what I once wished away.

So “The Grave Garden” contains different sorrows. The loss suffered by Kaiden’s parents. My tangential grief for a different kind of loss, suffering what I’d missed having: a first full love of motherhood. “The Grave Garden” tries to make sense of my interaction with the Senger family’s loss and my parallel sorrow. While all the threads belong together, the essay shows me deciphering my emotions and responses in way that feels a little too raw. There is not a tidy way to write any of what I am writing in that piece, but I respect the story enough to find a way to tell it well.

I just finished Educated by Tara Westover. She journaled all the way through her wild growing up years in rural Idaho, all the way through her sense of inadequacy. She learned how to say the truth plainly in the pages of a notebook. And then, much later, she put her experiences together in a memoir that talks intimately about tragic and difficult moments. At no point in the narrative does the reader wonder if Westover is just figuring out what she needs to survive her family, to thrive away from Idaho, to pursue meaningful work she couldn’t have imagined a decade before. While she walks us through her realizations, while we watch her grow, we trust she tells us her story from a place that is through – maybe still in the middle on some days, but mostly secure in her present place.

Perhaps drafting and revising “The Grave Garden” stood in for what I should have done, which is go to therapy. It’s upsetting to write hard words in my own hand. To say to myself what hurts. Really, I think I could have done a few sessions, whacked my way through a couple of big issues, been lifted more quickly than three years of writing about my grief for the Sengers, my grief for myself, the anger. I wrote from the middle. I wasn’t through much of anything when I started drafting the essay. I wanted to be through, I wanted to understand what we learn from such tragedy, what forgiveness I might extend myself, I wanted to know I could be a good mom even if I hadn’t wanted motherhood more than anything in the world. I very much started “The Grave Garden” in the middle and its revision is ungainly but I don’t negate the need for the work. How else might I learn to write about difficult things except to write about difficult things?

(994 words)

Ordinary Suffering/ Suffering Is Ordinary

April 10, 2018 By in Process Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Last week I was writing about suffering. I have been writing about suffering for years (because that’s a fun way to fill a notebook, right?) but this year I churn when I sit to write about suffering, with impatience to reach conclusion about what I see in the world, what I see in dear friends’ lives, what I feel in my body and mind. When considering others’ losses, I wonder if my own suffering is selfish. Does God care to comfort me when I am sad for nothing much, compared?

A few weeks ago, after a family suffered the death of their baby girl, my friend Sabrina listened to my very wandering thoughts about everything and said to think about what I am learning from the people in my life who suffer much. This circle of suffering friends includes Sabrina, in her first year of widowhood, her first year of single parenting. So last week when I was writing about suffering and a colleague asked what I was working on, I told him and he quoted an Auden poem – “About suffering they were never wrong,/ The old Masters: how well they understood” – which I looked up. Which sent me to Pieter Brueghel’s painting “Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus.” I read the poem, looked at the painting and found a way in.

The Fall Of Icarus

Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Ordinary Suffering/
A Response To “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Sarah Marslender

I was on the way to the airport to fly to Australia
when my grandfather died in Wisconsin,
but I read the news at the gate, leaned against
my husband. I thought, Grandpa knows everything/
I was at my work study when a plane flew into
the World Trade Center – we turned the radio on,
we thought it was impossible but true, returned
to our work/ Two weeks ago, I was walking down
a school hall when I checked my messages to
learn a friend’s baby died. With the time
difference between here and there, I couldn’t
remember what I was doing when this baby girl
left all of this world

I think about that – what I am doing when a
plane explodes in the air, or barrel bombs rain,
or the earth shakes foundations, slips mud, eats
half a mountainside town. I think about where I
am when, as if it matters at all

to join the suffering. We do not all turn away
from the boy who falls from sky. The fisherman
with his slender rod, the hawk on its slender branch,
the shepherd staring at sky – we do not all turn
away from ordinary suffering but you cannot
see our heads turn, our feet move before we
think, or how we lay that night seeing it again,
you cannot see what paint dried

Ordinary suffering/ suffering is ordinary, not
less than/ greater than, only part of being here
where people may fall from sky, or wake with a
mouthful of mud, or witness the brightest/ most
excruciating light before dark, or walk the next
day with empty hands