Monday, October 8, 2018

Life and Death


Lately all of my words have taken the shape of bullets, or at least of bullet points—short, quick little thoughts; captions meant to express the entirety of a moment in just one sentence. It's a consequence of working in social media, which is a big part of what I do on a day-to-day basis. In some ways I think this work has changed the way I think—soundbites instead of soliloquies—and to stop my search for words at the point of relevancy instead of pushing my shovel into the ground and digging for what's real or, scarier yet, raw; the things that may resonate with just the one or with none at all.

Social media is the work I've been entrusted with, and I am immeasurably grateful for it and seek to go about it with excellence. In my soul, though, I know I am a different kind of writer.

Even if a fully-formed fiction book never comes out of me, I know I am a novelist at heart because I cannot process thoughts and feelings without wrangling them down onto a page and looking at them, expressed. The alternative is to live with a crunch of the heart; a physical, fluttering sensation that tells me I'm feeling something that needs to, has to, be put into words.

So this is my attempt to pull down from the sky the "it" that is there, hovering around my heart for however long it's been—a year at least, or maybe all throughout my life, taking on new forms and reappearing unexpectedly during different seasons of change.

Life, death, time, faith. If I had to use bullet points, it would come down to these things. When the crunch is not so bad, I make light of it and say that I am just morbid—a Wednesday Adams dressed in brighter colors, a disguise that belies my too-frequent ruminations on the passage of time and the inevitable ending of each of our stories. Even as a child, I had a secret dread of birthdays. My grown-up evaluation is that I felt stalked by their approach and considered them thieves upon arrival; I saw them as taking away a year instead of giving me a new one. As a child though, it just felt like sadness. I remember sitting on my driveway, age seven, tears welling as I used chalk to write things like I hate eight all over the concrete. My parents came outside and wrote loving, corrective messages next to mine—Eight is great!—but in my heart, I knew the truth. I would never be seven again.

And here I am, age twenty-eight, and I know that I will never be here again. I lean into the mirror at night, inspecting my face, wondering if tonight will be the night I see the first line that sticks. I lay down in bed and give thanks for the husband lying next to me, the one I prayed for, the one I'm journeying with, and suddenly I'm choking back an entire tidal wave of fear pretending to be love—missing him before he's gone, aching with imagined absence.

I want to place the blame for this hyper-awareness on a few things that have happened over the last year—walking intimately with a friend through the unexpected death of her son and seeing the naked, grasping, wide-eyed pain that followed his loss. Sitting in a pew at my own grandmother's funeral a couple of months ago, eating the macaroni salad the church ladies made afterward, standing on a tarp with hard headstones underneath—the living shifting their feet on the dead as we waited to lower one more into the ground—wrestling for the first time with thoughts like, What if there really isn't anything beyond this?  

The truer reality, though, is that I have always struggled against the temptation to make time a god and place myself squarely in the center of the universe. It took doing a fictional free-write the other day to even come close to putting this into words:

The fan hums above our heads, filling the empty space.


“I’ve lowered my mother, a husband, a daughter, four sisters, and I don’t know how many friends into the ground—at my age, social calendars are mostly filled with funerals, you know. The advantages of youth and beauty are far behind me, and have been for some time. I would be lying if I said that life hasn’t felt like a slow, meaningless march toward death at times. But Tally, at some point in these eighty-two years, I realized that this earth wasn’t created just for me, and I wasn’t created just for this earth. Do you know what I mean by that?”


I push back against the panic that threatens to overwhelm—the tidal wave of thoughts screaming that the next funeral I attend will be hers—and manage, “I think so.”


She takes my hand in hers, running the roughness of her thumb back and forth against my palm. “I’m not the center of the story, honey, and this is only the beginning of my journey. I can throw myself a never-ending pity party, or I can choose to remember the joy I’ve experienced in between the pain and look for ways to serve others in the present. I’ve lost many things in this life, but I’ve gained wisdom, and perspective, and trust, and—best of all—you.”

. . .

In some ways, maybe it is a gift to view time as precious—but I'm realizing it can be warped into an unholy form of worship, too. Imagination is another gift that must be harnessed—at it's best, a creative force capable of prompting action due to the dreamer's ability to see something before it exists; at it's worst, a projection of a dark future that may never come to pass, and only serves to paralyze the dreamer in the present.

Lately, I've stared long and hard at doubts I would never have even given a second glance to at other points in my life. Beliefs ending in periods have wanted to morph into ellipses or question marks. Seeking comfort, I've looked for facts to confirm faith...then, afraid of where that search might lead, I've wondered if I should shut the door on entertaining thoughts like these at all. But in the midst of confusion and the wringing of hands, I'm reminded and strengthened by this:

You have searched me, Lord, and You know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; You perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; You are familiar with all my ways...

Where can I flee from Your presence? If I go up to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will guide me, Your right hand will hold me fast. 

If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," even the darkness will not be dark to You; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to You. Where can I go from Your Spirit? (Psalm 139) 

In the face of doubt, and the inevitability of loss, and the unstoppable passage of time, I will comfort myself not with reminders to "stay in the moment" and "take things one day at a time," but with my experienced knowledge of who Christ has been to me in this life; a knowledge temporal feelings cannot change; a knowledge upon which I will choose to find peace in the present and hope for the future.

I serve a God who took on flesh, who experienced birth and death with losses in between, who—when faced with His own impending death, prayed, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." (Luke 22:42) His humanity graciously revealed—my God and Savior, somehow relatable in His perfection.

He shared in our human experience and faced our human temptations in every way but this—in the hour of His greatest suffering, Jesus endured the agony of the Father turning His face away so that I never will. There is no pain, no circumstance, no loss, no transition that He will not be present for. He has promised, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you." (Hebrews 13:5)

Feelings and questions aside, with that knowledge I can say with confidence,

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Psalm 73:26) 
Karley with a K. Todos los derechos reservados. © Maira Gall.