When Life Brings Us to Our Knees
This is how we get up
My friend’s 17-year-old son hanged himself last winter. He would be dead right now if she hadn’t heard gasping sounds coming from his bedroom only to find him hanging in the doorway. She got underneath him and lifted his full body weight to release the pressure from the noose. His 13 year old brother helped her get him down.
Another friend’s son was born prematurely at 4 lbs 10 oz. I visited him in the NICU and watched as he writhed around, his body too tiny even for the preemie diaper. She called me a week later to tell me that he was blind.
My colleague at work is the primary caregiver for her mother. Her mom suffered a brain injury and aphasia as a result of multiple strokes. Her mom doesn’t understand why she lives in an assisted living facility with old people when she is only in her early sixties. She phones her multiple times a day with complaints, demands, and questions that have no answers. To make it even more crushing, her own mother calls her mom. “Mom! I haven’t seen you. When are you going to come and visit me?”
Life can bring you to your knees, and somehow you still get up and walk. There have been beautiful moments in the aftermath of these tragedies, but still it doesn’t erase any of the grief.
It’s possible that I may not be reporting all of these correctly. When your friends share this kind of pain, it thrusts you underwater into another dimension. You can barely hear them speaking to you because of the dissonance and echoing in your head. If it was at all helpful and appropriate, upon hearing this kind of news, you would claw at your head and stumble around so maybe you could unhear the truth. But since this helps no one, you remain composed and say things like, “I’m so sorry” and “What can I do?” and “Thank you for telling me”.
How is it possible that some of the best people in the world suffer the worst kinds of tragedies? What is the point of even trying if this is what life might have in store for us?
We may be tempted to ask why these things happen to good people, but as Anne Lamott writes, “this happens to people, and she is a human” (p. 183).
So instead, we show up, we listen, and we bring pastries. We drink coffee together, and offer to take their dog for a walk. We send texts, and sometimes even pizza. We try to stitch our friends back together. We try to make it easier for them to get out of bed each morning, and to put one foot in front of the other.
These are the small steps towards how we get back up.
We don’t do this because one day we hope they will do it for us. We do it because it is what makes us human. And in the doing, we heal ourselves as well.
