broken and breathing

One morning, some years ago, I woke up with a terrible pinch beneath my right shoulder blade; a weird nerve pain that flared hot whenever I turned my head. Moving like a robot and wincing every so often, I somehow managed to drop baby Beatrice at her sitter's and little Gabriel at the bus stop and make it on time to a staff meeting at work. I was sitting very still in a chair waiting for everyone to assemble, grateful to not have to move, when Bernadette, one of the other therapists at the student counseling service, asked what was wrong. I looked like I was holding my breath, she said.

Well, I guess I am, I explained. When I take a deep breath I can feel this awful pinched nerve in my back.

She was a psychiatric nurse and a practitioner of something called Healing Touch, and asked if she could help. Why not? So before the meeting got started, she spent a minute or two with her palms quietly placed on my shoulder blade.

Meagan, she said. When something hurts, it needs our attention. You need to breathe into this pain for it to resolve. Stop holding it. Breathe.

So I did. It hurt at first, and then, miraculously, it began to calm and relax. By the end of the day, I was moving just fine.

This past week has been hard. I've been managing the rocky sale of our old house, and collecting paperwork needed for the purchase of our new house - something that, among other things, required me to battle over many phone calls and many mixed messages with the bank holding our old mortgage, and eventually concede defeat, hire a lawyer, and submit paperwork at the county courthouse to become the official executrix of Mike's estate in order to fax them evidence that I am indeed she, and it is permissible to verify that I have been paying off a mortgage originally drawn up in Mike's name only. It wasn't so much the headache and expense of this task that I had hoped to avoid; it was the anguish of having to present his death certificate and will and brute reality of his death to impersonal clerks in a courthouse office. In the same room where three couples were waiting to process marriage licenses. Anguish isn't too strong a word. I started crying and couldn't stop, standing there at the brown formica countertop with my manila file of papers verifying that my husband was dead and trying to focus on writing out a check for $183.50 to cover the cost of creating something called a letter of administration. Then I went back to work to make my 2 pm appointment.

The next day, Saturday, I had a list of things I wanted to get done after Gabriel's soccer game: chores, packing, fixing the trail-a-bike so Beatrice and I could commute in the fresh fall air, groceries, phone calls. But the bike shop had attached the trail-a-bike to the wrong bike and the piece connecting it to the seat was full of shims I couldn't manage to pry out. I popped Bea in the car and ran back to have them fix it. I ran home. I realized that the old base of the baby seat was still on my bike, blocking the way to the hitch. I went through all the allen wrenches in the tool box. None fit the screws. I took a deep breath. Beatrice had been waiting all week for me to do this one thing. I called Teb. Could I come over and borrow some tools?

So Beatrice and I walked to Teb and Diana's. Annika and her friend Willow had planned a crafting afternoon with six other ten and eleven year old friends, and they were just trickling in, gathering around a table covered with tassels and embroidery thread and hot glue guns. Normally, this would be  a dreamy sight. But I felt intrusive, and burdensome, and the weight of the day - and the week, and the month, and the year - began to push inside me, all the way up to my eyeballs, and I knew I would cry.

Sheesh. What a time for it.

But Teb, emerging from the basement with a case of many allen wrenchs in his hands, saw me and sat me down right there in the middle of all the brewing fun and gave me his full attention. He squatted down next to me on his bum knee and let me cry and tell him about the pain of having to become the executrix of Mike's estate. The girls didn't seem to notice, or if they did they chose to ignore it. And after Teb had sat with me in that distress and grief, he suggested Beatrice stay for the big girl crafting, and that I do whatever I wanted to do, all by myself.

So I went on a long run, and went to the grocery store, and decided that was enough productivity for one day, and felt better.

Later Libby came over with her boys who had been playing with Gabriel. While all the kids played she sat with me at my kitchen table and listened as I shared various worries about my children - the things that bounce around in my mind, and rarely get articulated. The things I used to talk through with Mike. I felt that loss so keenly, noticing how I had so much to talk about, and so I cried some more, and she stayed with me. With her peaceful and loving presence she let me know it was perfectly fine to do so.

I was thinking about those moments yesterday morning while the children still slept and I gradually decided not to cajole and insist and fight them into going to our still-unknown and scary new church but rather use this Sunday for less emotionally demanding pursuits. In the quiet I was reading a Henri Nouwen book, Life of the Beloved, that a group of women from our old church and I decided to read together back in July. (Better late than never. We'll get to talking about it eventually.)

Still, my own pain in life has taught me that the first step to healing is not a step away from the pain, but a step towards it. When brokenness is, in fact, just as intimate a part of our being as our chosenness and our blessedness, we have to dare to overcome our fear and become familiar with it. Yes, we have to find the courage to embrace our own brokenness, to make our most feared enemy into a friend, and to claim it as an intimate companion. ... My own experience with anguish has been that facing it and living it through is the way to healing. But I cannot do that on my own. I need someone to keep me standing in it, to assure me that there is peace beyond anguish, life beyond death, and love beyond fear. 

The experience of grief can so often mimic depression; we bereaved feel a temptation to hide our suffering away - to cry in the shower, to wall it over with socially acceptable behaviors and gestures that do not, that cannot, come from our broken hearts but rather stem from an act of self-protective will. Play it cool until you can get home, get under the covers, all alone, that's where it's safe to suffer. And the sorrow of loss is, on the one hand, something one must endure - befriend - alone. In so many ways, it is a path that only I can walk.

But befriending one's brokenness (and aren't we all, in our own ways, in our own unique pain, called to move in this direction?) is a gesture I make while leaning on many loving arms. Left to my own devices, my pain would just turn in and in and in, and I would run to escape its unbearable weight, and that never ends well.

It is my community of friends and family that allows me to inhabit my pain. To breathe.

I told Teb, through tears, that I didn't want to go to court and file to become the executrix of Mike's estate because I didn't want Mike to not be alive anymore. I didn't want this. It hurts that I have this.

And he said, I know.

He didn't flinch, and he didn't offer me a drink or a snack, and he didn't say oh yes, but now you can finally move forward with this thing, it'll be fine you'll see, and he didn't say, oh look those girls could use my help with their beads, hold that thought, I'm off for another pair of needle nose pliers! Rather he kept me standing in it.

I wrote about our Coloradan river trip not too long ago, and how I wanted to find the courage to keep seeking out canyons. Now I see how my strong and loving friends, who are themselves not afraid of my pain, and even willing to be close enough to me to touch it and help hold it, to feel it with me, open up such sacred spaces all the time. In the momentary quiet of my kitchen, in the midst of a crafting party, in a busy cafe, on the front porch, their arms make sturdy mini-canyons in which my knees can buckle and my heart feel its brokenness all over again.

Nouwen also says I realize there is a mysterious link between our brokenness and our ability to give to each other. He writes of how our truest joy comes in the giving of ourselves to others - something we can only do when we have befriended our own pain. He likes food metaphors. Bread can only be given once it is broken. A meal is a time of vulnerability, of communion. One of my favorite cookbooks by Marion Cunningham includes a charming list of rules for breakfast. One of them (which I can't quote exactly, as I've already packed it) is to be polite, be kind, because everyone is defenseless at the breakfast table. I think that's true of all tables where we gather to give and receive and enjoy and look each other in the eyes. We're defenseless. That's why I love mealtimes. (And why resentful, angry dining companions are the stuff of excellent theatre and nightmare Thanksgiving memories).

Feeding and being fed seem to call forth something essential and joyful for me. That must be why I insisted on showing Libby a new cookbook my friend Sarah sent me just moments after my tears had slowed. I want to make you this, and this, and this. I want to give you a beautiful salad; I want to give you myself.

I pray that someday I can know, deep in my heart and bones and muscles, that I already had given myself to her, just as she had given herself to me. For those with the capacity and willingness to receive it, sharing our brokeness is a gift. A blessing. A deepening ripple of love moving outwards to touch countless others.


World without end.