WHAT WE CARRY
There are places we return to without ever going back.
____________________
I will my body to be still as she reveals her story, one painful to hear, never mind endure.
I hear her words. But my eyes are set on her mouth, its twisting and pursing in defiance. As if the words themselves are threat.
We, you and I, can testify to the biology of grief over losses of relationships, dreams, and hopes—
How it nests itself in hidden spaces,
and reveals itself in unexpected places
like walks, and drives, and showers.
To sit quietly, uninterrupted in grief, ours or another’s, feels overwhelming without Guidance from something other than our limited view.
I am in awe of what we are able to endure. An endurance not without cost.
These days, I have more conversations with the Invisible than anyone clothed in flesh. I find a comfort there that has the ability to meet me in profound loss, even in its absence of physical or audible soothing.
What I carry, I carried.
What I grieve is not only comprehended but felt. The only one who can meet me is the One who asks me to stand, physically, in the moment. He waits for me there.
This suffering—of fluorescent corridors and metal gurneys, of two am wake ups when hope slumbers—
is our portal to three hours a lifetime ago when the world went dark.
We still feel the darkness.
Live the darkness.
Not as cosmic punishment but as gift, unwanted, unimaginable as it is.
I have not once seen myself ugly cry. In fact, there are rarely tears. But I have held my gaze in moments of excruciating humanity when the body uncontrollably reveals the torment of the soul.
The flesh has no mechanism for modulation in a grief given over.
Grief given over is the territory where God dwells.
This is me, a defining moment in treatment. A woman I recognize completely and barely know anymore.
She, too, was standing at an intersection.
She, too, had decided to turn left.
Despite the poured-out good intentions of others, there are some journeys we must take alone. This one pulls me in like a page-turner. Despite the often-difficult moments, it’s impossible to put down.
There was [and is] no one to rescue me from what is inside of me or ahead.
This adventure was designed with the intention of teaching me to run to myself.
At one time I believed I was unaccompanied. Because there are places no one clothed in flesh can go with us. Decisions no one can make for us. Grief that cannot be divided among the people we love.
But alone? No.
I know that now. I have known all along.
Maybe knowing is one of those things that deepens each time life brings us back to the place where we first learned it.
There was a time chemotherapy saved my life and in that moment I was as certain that it was imperative as I am that in this season, it isn’t right.
There is no indictment in that.
No regret.
No declaration that what was right then was somehow wrong because it isn’t right now.
Perhaps wisdom is recognizing when the answer has changed. And having the courage to change with it.
What we carry is the burden of knowing ourselves—
of listening to the inside voice,
coaxing it to yell if it’s the only way to hear,
of looking hard at every option,
letting go of what we think we know,
of reconciling there is an active part that often comes before the being still,
of being willing to do the thing that feels most right when others have a differing view.
Four years ago, I called that a burden.
Today, I wonder if it is a gift.
Recently the words have been “appearing” as maps. Not the kind that tell us how to get somewhere. But the ones we trace after we have already traveled some distance and finally recognize the places we have been.
A Soul Map.
Mine would show that I have arrived somewhere familiar.
I have turned left before. For a moment, that realization feels unsettling. Are we really doing this again?
Maybe that is what we’ve misunderstood about returning. We imagine a life well lived should be a straight line. Forward movement. New territory. No repeats.
But what if the journey is not a line?
What if it bends back toward itself?
What if we are sometimes returned to an old intersection not because we have failed to move forward, but because we are finally carrying what we need to meet it differently?
I am not the woman who stood here four years ago.
But I carry her.
Her certainty.
Her questions.
Her willingness to disappoint.
Her insistence on listening.
Her knowledge that the thing that once saved her could cease to be the thing that would save her next.
I carry the woman before her, too.
And the one before that.
And here I am.
Not empty-handed.
Not so different.
Not at all the same.
NOTES
SOUL MAP
her story → grief → the Invisible → Unaccompanied → alone? → knowing → turn left → the answer changed → carry her → carried → evidence → HERE
A Soul Map is not the chronology of what happened to us.
It is the trail of what happened inside us.
And sometimes the most important pins are dropped in places we recognize.
We are so aware of what life has asked us to carry.
Less aware of what has carried us.
I can see myself three years ago, standing at this very intersection.
Somehow she left something here for me.
A marker.
A knowing.
A little evidence scratched into the road:
You have been here before.
NOW TRACE YOUR OWN
Not simply the things that happened.
The places something changed inside you.
Where did grief enter?
Where did you feel alone?
Where did something Invisible meet you?
Where did you make the choice no one else could make for you?
Where have you found yourself standing somewhere familiar?
What did the person who stood there before leave behind for you?
Drop your pins.
_____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → HERE
REFLECTION
What has been carrying you?
YOU ARE HERE.
Image: Maybe you’ve seen this image before. It’s worthy of a repeat. Ironically, I look healthier in this picture than I had in the years leading up to this moment. Sometimes it takes a severe moment to wake us up. This was mine. And, it’s the best example of a “carried” season that I can share. Because I love you.
The only one who can meet me is One who asks me to stand, physically, in the moment. He waits for me there.—Janene Kraft