It’s a strange thing to read your own memoirs, even when you are the one who wrote them.
Last Friday, I ironically finished my final round of proofreads in the very hotel we stayed when Caleb, our oldest, was in a coma after his rollover accident. Everything about Friday was surreal: wrapping up a very long book journey, considering how far our son and our family have come, and rereading my own words about my own life. I know I lived it; I know I anguished to select every single written word. Even still, I can’t quite seem to contain it all.
Finishing my final edits in that hotel was a lot; I recalled falling into bed almost six years ago after I-don’t-even-know how many sleepless hours, not knowing whether Caleb would live or die. Accordingly, that hotel will always feel slightly haunted.
Friday night, all the emotions I’ve accumulated over a lifetime came swirling back—the exhaustion, pain, despair, and complete overwhelm, but also the quiet joy, peace, and laughter–and I ended up commemorating their strange amalgamation in the hotel lobby over a glass of wine and chicken wings (a strange amalgam as well, I know). While we experience many of life’s landmarks communally, this was a finish line that needed to be crossed alone. I needed an anonymous space to celebrate and grieve the last twenty-four years of motherhood, to not only relish but mourn the sum of my lived moments and parts.
I ended the night emotionally purging in the hotel shower, where the water ritualistically merged with my tears and disappeared down the drain. Life, like hot water, has cleansed and renewed me, even scalded me at times. But, like everything else, it’s passing away, slipping and swirling down the drain.
Life’s a funny thing. I know everyone says this, but it’s true; I was just a young mom caught in never-ending cycles of laundry, cooking, and cleaning. I never had a single second to myself, and there was no light at the end of the tunnel to be seen. Then, one morning, I woke up, and my hair was turning gray, my children were grown, and my nearly empty house was eerily silent.
Curiously, the completion of my first book has aligned with several other significant life-endings. I am two months away from my youngest child’s high school graduation. I am well into the dregs of peri-menopause. My fertility is (sadly and thankfully) nearly a thing of the past, as is motherhood as I’ve known it the last twenty-four years.
Truly, I am standing on a threshold. I can look back with fondness and remorse but cannot yet see what the future will hold. Will my book sink or swim? My children? Life? Me?
I refuse to believe my best years are behind me. I can’t wait to be a gramma; I don’t dread aging; I can’t wait to travel and live life with my husband—my soulmate and best friend. Even so, a significant leg of my journey is ending. I know I will always be a mother, but never in the same way. And that fact makes my chest constrict and burn and brings tears to my eyes.
My arms will never encircle my children in the same way. Our house will never ring with laughter in the same way. My children will never need me in the same way, nor will I ever impact them in the same way. My role in their lives is changing; they are changing; I am changing.
Everything is changing, changing, always changing.
Subconsciously, I suppose my body knew I needed to ceremoniously commemorate this threshold, although I doubt whether it planned on Embassy Suites’ chicken wings and wine. I needed to attend my own funeral, of sorts, to establish a mental tombstone at the gateway of one of many deaths in anticipation of yet another rebirth. I needed a way to celebrate surviving my life and who I’ve become, as well as to grieve my errors and losses, including the young woman I was.
I know my book is not the best ever written. I don’t know whether anyone besides close friends and family members will read it. But, I do know that I wholeheartedly honored my initial commitment to authenticity and honesty. I do know there is not one falsely written or exaggerated word. I do know that I’ve left a paper trail for my children, that treasures the highs and the lows, the wins and the losses, and the tears and the laughter.
If nothing else, writing this book has helped heal me. It’s forced me to admit the truths I concealed, feel the feelings I buried, and recall the many instances I preferred to forget.
And at the end of the day, I wouldn’t change a single thing.
For, in my own words, “…there is no way of disentangling the good moments from the bad or the happy memories from the painful ones. They have all been intertwined, each pregnant with potential and highly profitable; if even one is removed, the whole tower topples. Without any singular aspect of our life, I cease to be me.”
In all fairness, thresholds are terrifying places. They are precipices signifying closure, endings, and, ultimately, death. Yet we so often try to leap through these doorways the same way we rip off a Band-Aid–fast and furious, eyes clenched, teeth gritted, and contemplating anything other than the present sensations.
But, in doing so, we forego the opportunity to grieve, weep, lament, repent, and amend. We miss the chance to relinquish old, heavy baggage and guilt.
We also miss the opportunity to cherish the good memories, our hard work, our victories…our becomings.
Ultimately, we miss out on being human.
For joy does not exist without the contrast of sorrow. Pain is what drives us to heal. Grief connects us with our deep inner soul. Despite the ache of emotions, without them, we are but hollow echoings of the embodied feeling, thinking beings we were created to be.
By the time we actually die, we will have (ideally) already survived a million smaller deaths. We will know in our bodies that life not only precedes death but follows it as well. We must remember to not stop short at a “life-death” pattern, but to step through each threshold we encounter, thereby completing the resurrectional cycle of “life-death…life.”
May we not be careless as we transition through this journey; for life is not something to be survived, but a gift to be imbibed, tasted, fully experienced, and savored.
~
A Blessing
May you be blessed in the Holy Names of those who carry our pain up the mountain of transfiguration.
May you know tender shelter and healing blessing when you are called to stand in the place of pain.
May the places of darkness within you be turned towards the light.
May you be granted the wisdom to avoid false resistance and when suffering knocks on the door of your life, may you be able to glimpse its hidden gift.
May you be able to see the fruits of suffering.
May memory bless and shelter you with the hard-earned light of past travail, may this give you confidence and trust.
May a window of light always surprise you.
May the grace of transfiguration heal your wounds.
May you know that even though the storm might rage yet not a hair of your head will be harmed.
–Eternal Echoes by John O’Donohue
