“Without your wound where would your power be? It is your very remorse that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In love’s service only the wounded soldiers can serve.” –Thornton Wilder, “The Angel That Troubled the Waters”
The toys are still missing from the waiting room.
I observed this fact during The Kid’s weekly speech therapy appointment, the one appointment we keep in person these days, the one forty-five minute span of time each week when I sit indoors, masked, and hear him battling through l and n sounds and social stories in the adjacent room. Whenever I’m in a waiting room, I feel at least a brief echo of all the waiting rooms: of the hospitals and doctors’ offices and therapy clinics, and of the struggles and victories they provided. And on this Monday, sitting in this room, I thought about what a cruel version of reality we’re living through, that these rooms into which life’s wounds hurtle us–these crucibles with couches–that they can’t even offer toys right now.
We are living through such a period of intense loss, though I’m not sure we all realise it. Loss is one of those words that gets misunderstood, like freedom. Loss isn’t a singular event. Right now, it is our daily reality. We have lost so very much. If we aren’t grieving, we aren’t paying attention.
I was watching the first volume of the second season of this anthology, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t rip my heart out right in front of the TV and stomp all over it. And I was so weirdly grateful for that. Ever since I jumped onto the medication bandwagon during a season of postpartum depression (that was a cousin of the regular old depression I’ve always battled) and popped that first Lexapro, I worried it would render me flatlined emotionally, devoid of the highs and lows I was used to feeling. So now, anytime I do cry, I feel a strange relief: it’s still there. I’m still me. Because, in the end, I’m not interested in our storied strengths as much as I am in our unveiled weaknesses. If you’re broken and on nodding terms with it, come sit by me.
Anyway, this episode was, as mentioned, a real tearjerker, and as I indulged a good cry there on my bed (not dissimilar to the one I had last lockdown, after a panic attack, but who’s keeping track), I heard one of the characters tell another, “”We get lost together.”
Maybe that’s the point in all this loss: that we feel it together. That we’re not alone, ultimately, because we have the people who are willing to get lost alongside us, and the grace that holds us all. The people and grace whom we see and who see us–and how lost can you really be if you have that?
We went to a new secret beach a couple of weekends ago, the four of us, and I wonder how many of these secret beaches we would have been motivated to find had we not lost all other options of activity? This one was at the bottom of some rocky stairs: it opened out in front of us, and for a moment I was lost–which beach was across the way? In which direction were we pointed? Where were we exactly? So The Husband and I sorted that out, and the boys sorted their snacks out of the backpack, and I inched into the cold salt water, looking ahead.
Once I made my way back to the sand, The Kid and Little Brother emerged from their rock picnic. LB leaned forward off the rock and I grabbed him, because I still can, and placed him on the sand. TK scrambled down on his bottom and stood beside me. “You looked beautiful,” he said, and he pronounces it “beauty-full” which may not be entirely correct but absolutely is, and he continued, “when you were standing out there in the water.”
He saw me, and that’s what he said, and don’t we all need a word like that right now, and the recognition that accompanies it? Of all the things we’ve lost, in that moment, my breath was one I didn’t miss. Beauty-full.