Not Heaven Yet

They have been a long time in coming, and still, only now are taking hold, but there are some lessons I am learning.

On Easter Sunday last week, as I was speeding towards Grand Rapids, my dad was locking the shop doors, lying down in his truck, and swallowing enough pills "just to make me sleep for a long time". Five days later, my twelve year old sister, who has been with our family for five years now, stood in the kitchen, coughing lungfuls of bright red blood over the white linoleum and was sped to the hospital.

My soul, my heart, my tear ducts, are a little numb. It does feel, I will admit, as though a curse settled over our family two years ago, like a black garbage bag. Suffocating.

For two years I have worked towards re-creating some sense of normalcy in my life. I have been re-building by fingernail, by skin cell, by hair strand, by bone chip, the body of reality that was lost to me. But it has often felt that just as a kneecap pops back into place, the entire leg falls off the hip, and I am left again, with all of these misfit parts, all aching and throbbing in too many places to touch at once.

I have been wondering when God is going to let up. I have been asking, a little loudly, how much he thinks one family can take. I've been asking when I get my life back.

The surprisingly comforting answer came to me yesterday, as it always does, true and gentle, like he had been singing it to me all this time. "This is your life, Ang." God always calls me Ang.

I have seen all of these pains as sick intrusions on reality. I have scrubbed them and burned them and sanitized and drugged them. They do not belong here. I thought.

My lesson, my little piece of skin holding muscle in place is this: Take the needle. Take the thread. Sew the sorrow like a graft on the wound. Learn to move inside the misfit pieces of you, and not you, adding and re-stitching, until the wearings and the washings, and the sun's shining, darkens your skin and fades the patches, until there is no "this" and "that", just a blending of one into the other, a bleeding together to make a whole. Nothing will ever be as it was. It is all becoming.