This Is A Grace: The Chemistry of Resilience

This one's important: Open up the link and listen. And read.

Where are we standing? What is our foundation?

Do we believe the words we say, the psalms we sing?

Because the answers to these things matter, so we begin here:

Breathe.

Let's see

if we

can work.

Futile was meant to acknowledge that there are times when words do nothing for us. What do you say when a mother dies or when a baby is sick? And grandparents--how do you reconcile the aging and disappearance--however gradual or sudden--of the matriarchs and patriarchs of our births and breakfasts and parents. So words teach nothing, change nothing, but things happen.

Life moves and bends to its own will--no, a higher will--nothing within our grasp, and only marginally within our ability to comprehend.

How do you console the people you love when your desires say "Ache, only aching"?

You breathe. Count your blessings, title your stories, and serialize your library.

You say goodbyes and place low shaking hands on shoulders and spines.

It is not healing, but it is something.

I'm grasping for mercy, shreds of redemption to neutralize the sadness of all these unstitched stories.

You've got me in your sea,

Braced until the end.

We are tattered; we are salvaged.

We find something in our pain.

This is a grace.

We find in our pain the ability to heal: the chemistry of resilience. It is a chaotic enigma that is birthed in our bones and matured in our bending years of immunizations and practical imbalance.

We pull the staples from our hearts and lay them to rest with the dead, no grudge to be held at the absence of miracle.

Perhaps we call this acceptance. Others will say denial or surrender. Titles are yet irrelevant: futile words.

Benign or malignant. Terminal, stable, recovering. In remission.

Superfluous.

All meaningless in the grace we find: we were given the ability to bend without breaking, to wither without fading, to feel without dying. But we die every day to the staples and strings that hold our fringes to the tucked edges of composure.

We are master needleworkers. We just never knew.

It's hard to believe that one year ago.

One year ago we were hurting, and we still are.

We demand healing with expectation and remorse, laden with color and tragedy.

One year ago, I was finding out I had missed the last class I ever should've had with my greatest mentor. I was melting under Spring sunlight while the diagnosis was sprinkled over enameled tables and patterned carpet in a white walled room.

I still wonder what the breathing sounded like after she said it, but I wasn't there, and never saw her again.

And as the months came to us, we lost her. At least, those are the words we use.

But I don't think she was anymore lost than she ever was; she was only leaving.

It's not so easy in other stories. Not that grieving her is easy.

We do lose people in death some times, but more in age: the way in creeps into their heads--sneaky small and limber--and cuts the wiring, leaving them short-circuited.

The years do things to us, to the people we have always loved, that we don't understand.

We're something in sight of everything all our hopes had in mind.

Years make Grandma forget which of her children went to which colleges. And what their friends names were.

Years make Grandpa say things to me that I can't accept or comprehend. The time turns him into someone else, who doesn't see me as an eight year old who wants to tell him that she took her nap for the day. The time brings his cancer back, and the decade nuzzles into his spine and rests there.

Years bury our secrets, and age our children.

Years make us love more and less and strangely.

Years break our kitchen tables and fade our scars-from trees and men and scalpels.

And years teach us, not words.

It's hard to believe that one year ago...

was only that, a year ago.

This--the quick passing of time over our sorrows and memories and sleep--this is a grace.

And the words that we use in the moments between are indeed futile at the end of things. It is something more profound than what the term loss can communicate. It is absence. And the impossibility of the presence of what we had planned is more than grief, more than aching. It is numbness and vulnerability and anger and so many things we cannot name.

The chemistry of resilience: a science we learn as a result of the biology of man.

And I'll hold you now, forever I know.

We are not breaking; we bend. And heal.
We stitch and save.

So we begin: breathe.

I have no words to heal, only thread and time.

Song "Let's See If We Can" by the fantastical musicians, Green or Blue. I write to their music pretty often and am glad they're making it. Check them out on Facebook or Youtube and listen to their stuff.

And as always, thanks for reading.