Afraid

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. 

– C.S. Lewis

 

I keep trying to write this post and find it hard to type the words. A couple of years ago, I wrote about how death is like taking someone to the airport. That feels truer to me now than ever.

I think about death a lot, actually. Maybe not death as itself, as the thing where someone stops breathing or as the moving from one plane to the next or even as the lack of being in the universe -- I just keep thinking about how death means separation. Separation from your earthly body, separation from the people you love who are here, present in the world.

I think about death a lot. I think it must be hardest on the people who are left, the ones who haven’t left the ground yet. You know that panicky, sick feeling you get when you’re saying goodbye to someone and you know it might be a long time before you see them again and you think, I can’t NOT be with you in the world? That’s what makes me afraid. I keep hearing Heathcliff in my head: “Be with me always…only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God, it is unutterable. I cannot live without my life. I cannot live without my soul.”

I know that death does not have to mean eternal separation. But I can’t imagine anything harder or more frightening than that earthly separation. I am not afraid of death. I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of being left behind.

love, elizabeth

PS: I’ve missed a week of blogging for the Blog Every Day in May challenge but I am determined to catch up. My apologies, in advance, to your blog feed.

impossible until it’s not

This was in my fortune cookie the other night.

The hard things keep coming, don’t they? Sometimes I stare at the calendar and think, There is no way I will make it to May. There is no way I will make it through next week. I am so quick to jump ahead to all the things in the universe I can’t imagine shouldering right now. If we got a bill for x amount of dollars, I could not pay it. If I had to turn in my dissertation prospectus tomorrow, I wouldn’t be ready. If a giant robot took over Columbus and forced all humans underground, I wouldn’t have enough bottled water to keep us alive.

I am learning to trust. It’s slow but I’m learning. I try to think back to the all the impossible things I’ve done. Passing my candidacy exam felt impossible. It felt huge, insurmountable. But I did it. Step by step. It’s not as if one minute I was a PhD student and the next I was a PhD candidate. It was night after day after night of reading. It was one exam day at a time, one sentence at a time, one question at a time, one book at a time. It was impossible…until the moment it wasn’t.

I am struggling not to leap ahead to the next impossible thing I can’t imagine overcoming. Some days, I feel scared out of my  mind by how much feels impossible. But that is not how we are supposed to live. That is not how I want to live. 

Things are only impossible…until they are not.

love, elizabeth

The best and worst thing about being married

 

There is nothing like a late-night phone call to remind you that life is fragile, time is short, and no one but God knows the future.

The other night, in the middle of a small family crisis, I was reminded of that thing that is so hard to explain about marriage. Sitting on the floor next to Kyle as he made frantic phone calls to various family members, watching his forehead wrinkle in worry, his calloused fingers pinching the bridge of his nose, his mouth pursed in a hard line, I thought, “This is what is so hard about being married. You aren’t just sharing a house, a bank account, a last name…you’re taking on every fear, every crisis, every unknown as if it was yours at birth.” There’s something frightening about that and comforting, too.

“I’m scared,” I whispered in Kyle’s ear.

He nodded.

I squeezed his hand. “I’m here,” I said. “I’ll be here no matter what, okay?”

“Yeah,” he said.

Somehow marriage doubles our fears and halves them at the same time.

A couple weeks ago, Kyle took me to dinner and I poured out my stresses on him. “I’m worried about this exam,” I told him. “I have so much to read and it feels like the time is slipping away and I’m not doing enough.”

“Just remember you’re not all alone,” he said. “I’m right here.”

Every joy is doubled; every pain is, too. And still, it makes me feel braver as we sit here on the floor by the couch, our shoulders and heads bent towards each other, waiting to hear good news, or bad news, or any news, at all. The best part and the worst part about being married is sitting here, holding your hand in the dark.

love, elizabeth

Being Intentional

Here’s the thing about this semester. I feel so lost. Studying for this candidacy exam or comps or generals or whatever it is we call it…it’s completely confusing. I mean, it sounds straightforward when they explain it to you. “Read this list of books. Take a test. Defend your answers. Pass.” But right now I feel like I’m drowning in a sea of reading in four different disciplines within my field and I am petrified that I am screwing this up. I can’t read fast enough or smart enough or carefully enough. There’s the time frame, too. 18 hours of writing…18 hours??? Who thought THAT up? I don’t even know if I have 18 hours of knowledge inside of me. And no matter how many times people tell me that I don’t need to know everything in every book, I still keep trying to read every word of every sentence of every chapter and I just don’t have TIME for that. The exam is two months away and I feel like I know less than ever. All that being said…this too will pass. Like every other impossible academic thing I’ve done so far, it will happen.

I’ve been realizing that a good part of my discouragement is coming from a feeling of aimlessness. I have somehow lost my intentionality.

And it’s not just my study habits that are suffering right now. It’s my downtime. I am realizing that I need to be just as intentional about the time I’m NOT reading as the time I am. It’s not actually restful or helpful if I spend every moment away from my books feeling guilty about not reading, worrying, making lists, or watching hours of mindless television streaming on the internet. I need to be intentional about seeking real rest and real renewal. I need to be intentional about physical activity. I need to be intentional about eating balanced meals and getting enough sleep. I need to be intentional about blogging.

Blogging has been a real place of solace and peace for me in the last couple of years. I really don’t want to lose its place in my routine. But that requires intentional time. I am choosing to blog right now. I am not watching TV. I am not sleeping. And I am not studying. I am blogging.

I guess the thing I’m learning is that being intentional in any circumstance requires you to live, if only temporarily, in that present moment. I need to live inside of a moment instead of trying always to bypass it, rush through it, always planning for the next crisis. I need to be here. With you. For just this moment.

love, elizabeth