three words

A year ago, one of my dearest friends became very, very ill very, very fast and came very, very close to dying. It was a wallop out of nowhere. One minute I’m celebrating with her the beautiful photos she texted from a walk on the beach in California, the next she’s being life-flighted to Albuquerque.

Twelve years ago, I wrote this after the life I knew and expected to continue vanished and my husband and I found ourselves in a nightmare beyond anything we could have imagined.

“I am pretty sure if we really grasped the fragile nature of this life, we’d all be shrieking, hair-tearing lunatics, too frightened to step out the front door. I, maybe most of us, live in an insulated state, making my little plans, setting out each day to accomplish this task and that one. It does not normally occur to me that any moment the earth might yawn wide beneath my feet, plunging me into a chasm of uncertainty that is the only real absolute in life. Who could actually live with that kind of knowing?

“When a little over a month ago [in 2011] my husband woke from a nap swollen and gasping for air, we fell into the abyss. I know terrible things happen to people every day; I’m no Pollyanna. Dreadful, unexpected, unplanned for events happen with fair regularity and we are none of us immune. Yet I don’t think anyone can live sanely with a real time awareness of that second life, the swirling, fetid undercurrent below the good life we all expect and hope to live in. Down there lies sudden, severe illness, death, natural disaster, war, murder, personal crises of every stripe, and devastating world events. It is silent, this tandem reality, yet as ever-present as the one we live in most days.

“Without beating to death the obvious, it is the most extraordinary thing to know the very instant, the moment, the nanosecond that life changes. “I can’t breathe.” Three words irrevocably changed the world from that second forward.”

So much has changed since Mike’s death a year after I wrote that. An entirely new and spectacular world has been revealed, and I’m deeply grateful. I’ve been entirely freed of a lifelong terror of dying, a plague that was so disabling and persistent, I feel giddy with joy when I think about it. Because, truth: we don’t die. We don’t.

We drop our human personas, yes, but that only allows us to re-experience the magnificence of our true selves absent the distraction of human existence. My greatest wish is that none of us would ever have to experience the depths of suffering and misery that forced me to this discovery, divine and life-changing as it is. But it’s such a shared and common thing, despite our efforts to pretend otherwise, I can’t help but think it’s a major element of our purpose in coming here.

Our souls don’t arrive here with the assumption we’ll avoid human travails. It’s an obstacle course, human life, and while we can dodge this challenge or that one, we will undoubtedly be tripped up by another. It’s just how it works. No blame, no judgment, they’re just bumps in the road ~ or gaping deep crevasses.

You. Didn’t. Cause. It.

You. Have. Not. Failed.

You could never have been good enough to avoid human reality.

As much as it feels like a gut punch, it’s what we came here for. The challenges. We already had bliss.

One of the countless gifts of the last decade has been coming to know so many people who’ve been face to face with shattering loss and have found a new reality. The members of Helping Parents Heal, for example, are kindred spirits who know and have found the same truth. Despite the devastation left behind when one we love ceases to breathe, they’ve not gone anywhere. They’re Still Right Here.

But knowing that doesn’t make us immune to heartache, does it? Just in the last couple of weeks, my niece, a dear friend, and a beloved little creature have died and, yeah, I wiped out on the surfboard that usually keeps me skimming along the waves in the sunshine of life. I went under. It lasted four days this time, unlike the months of madness that followed my husband’s three words.

But even in the plunge, because I know the truth now, there actually is a difference. There’s much observing of ~ and less being buried in ~ the sorrow. There is a welcome separation. The eternal *I* recognizes the transient nature of suffering, even while the human *i* is heartbroken. I’m reminded of the Buddhist master who said, upon leaving his father’s deathbed, “My father has died. I am weeping, and yet my heart rejoices.”

While Raven was being helicoptered through the night skies of New Mexico a year ago, I was frantically changing long-held plans to go to old Mexico for whale sharks. And the next day, having taken off for a flight to New Mexico, there was another of those life-has-changed-irrevocably moments in the Dallas airport.

I called for an update from Albuquerque. Stephanie, Raven’s niece, said, “It’s bad. She’s on a vent, but they can’t get her oxygen up out of the low 80s. She’s not perfusing.”

She’s. Not. Perfusing. Substitute “he” in that ghastly sentence and it was a repeat of Mike’s last day on earth ten years before.

She’s not perfusing.

He’s not perfusing.

Love is not perfusing. Connection is not perfusing. My own heart felt as if it stopped perfusing along with those words.

Just as when Mike, in the three words, I can’t breathe, announced that life as we knew it was over, I can remember with complete clarity where I was standing at Love Field, leaning against the wall, trying to comprehend what I was hearing, how Raven could deteriorate so drastically in the two hours I flew from Atlanta to Dallas.

I can see precisely how the place looked, feel the movement of air from hundreds of people flowing past as I tried to make sense of the into-the-darkness words of Stephanie’s report. How can life just go on when everything has changed so drastically?

Honestly, even knowing what I know now, daily experiencing the solid safety and security that comes from having directly experienced the greater reality, there’s still a wish to avoid it, the rocky, crashing, ruinous parts of this human life. “Dreadful, unexpected, unplanned for events happen with fair regularity and we are none of us immune.”

Reading that, the thought comes: “Beam me up.” Knowing there is more, I can sometimes feel so over this, and yet invariably there is the pull back here, by family, by friends, by the beauty of nature, heart dogs, and so much more. We’re pulled by love. Most days, it’s enough. The other kind of days don’t last so long anymore.

And now? Today? Raven is alive. She is well. She miraculously survived Legionnaire’s, sepsis, ARDs, the terrors of intubation, and a long ICU stay. We’re talking about the events of a year ago as they’re coming up, remembering, working through it. All is well for this moment and yep, that’s all we have to live in, but realistically, that’s not how most of us do this life. (Shout out to the cave-dwelling monks in the Himalayas, the cloistered nuns in France, and so many more who hold space for the rest of us out here in the fray.)

I was thinking about all of this this morning. About saying goodbye to Kim, Lilli, and Millie two weeks ago, about Raven’s near miss with ascension last year. And that, of course, took me to the other losses of the last decade. Eight close friends, my father, my husband, his beloved JRT Bill, my heart dog, Boo. My divine golden doggy niece, Sona. And, thinking of Mike, feeling a little melancholy (can’t we just coast for a while? can’t we catch our breath here?), I was talking to him, telling him I miss him, though I know that he already knows.

Turning to Facebook for distraction and hoping for some inspiration, I opened it to see ~ posted eight hours before by my friend Valerie ~ a hello from Mike. I’m connected to 1100+ people on Facebook, yet right there, first up in the newsfeed, Valerie’s ancient-by-FB-standards photos of Vedauwoo, Wyoming, a sacred place for my sweet husband.

I was so surprised ~ and delighted ~ that I had to comment.

Oh my stars, I was sitting here this morning thinking about this life, and how ~ in an instant ~ everything we know can vanish or change in ways we’d never expect (or want). … I’m missing Mike, and on Facebook I find that 8 HOURS ago you posted about this magical place and yet it’s the first thing in my feed. It was HIS place, as a child… He and I went there on our first visit to Wyoming. There are ashes of my brother-in-law trapped in the crevices there. It’s a sacred, holy space, a touchstone for my baby, who is so clearly showing me he’s still right here. Thank you, Valerie, for the reminder. We’re never alone, even when it feels like it.

I know other trios of words now, words from the shiny Aware side of life. We don’t die. Still right here. We’re never alone. All is well. Those are the truest words, eternal words. The others, devastating as they are in the moment, are clouds in the reality of an eternal blue sky. Granted, thunderheads, tornados, wall clouds of sorrow and loss are found there, but always, always they pass. The storms pass. The waves calm. We right ourselves. We go on.

Three words. Three words. Why does that seem to be a thing? (Lapsed Lutheran that I am, I can’t help but think also of, “It is finished,” the last three words of the Nazarene and of every one of us once we get our going-Home tickets.) But in my own life, before I came to know, the three words were always wretched. I can’t breathe. He’s not perfusing. No brainwave activity. And early on, at the age of 12, my father’s words, my wife left, my pistol’s gone.

Grief almost always becomes tolerable in the rear view mirror. We almost always clamber out of whatever depths we plunge into. But Post-breath, there is certainty, no “almost.”

We are always welcomed and entirely healed by Love. And writing those words, about Home and welcome and love, I’m feeling deep within the absolute of two more verbal trifectas related to the Big Love that awaits us all: I know this. I trust this. I hope you do too.