An extraordinary amount of time has passed since I last wrote publicly, which either means my brain is full of thoughts needing to be penned and sorted out or full of unprocessed experiences and ideas that don’t yet seem coherent enough to be whole and ready for complete sentences. Maybe a little bit of both. Mostly, I think, the latter. Several days ago I received a check in the mail for my contributions to a book project that will be published this Fall. Two days later I sent a letter off to The Good Poet in Canada, who had said in his previous correspondence: “It’s not easy to be a poet. (Even one like me). In 2015 my book sold 6 copoes (I am serious). When you sell 6 copies in 12 months...you wonder does anyone give a rat’s ---? And then I get a lengthy epistle from J Richerson, and I get back to work on my latest draft.” “Keep writing, Poet,” I replied in pen. “Most of the Greats weren’t truly discovered until they were gone. But they wrote/painted/created anyway--for the love of it, and for the love of humanity. Your words touch souls, deeply, and that is what matters. None of your friends care if you’re a bestseller, and none of mine do either. We perfect our craft for the joy of it...and because we can’t not. Love and Peace. Signed, Jordan your Friend.” Yesterday, I received an email from a longtime international friend, proposing that I become the copywriter for her up-and-coming company and receive full compensation. Today I took a break from practice exams to pen a couple notes--one to a pen pal and one to a best friend who needed to be congratulated on big news. These events served to remind me that writing is, in fact, something I do--and that it’s important that I write for writing’s sake. The issue these past five weeks has been...confidentiality. I am spending this semester working as a student nurse: 3-4 days a week, 12-hour shifts, in various hospitals and with various preceptors. Sometimes I work days, sometimes nights. During my first three-week rotation, I saw a lot of death. I hadn’t prepared for it to be that way...I didn’t know that "Actively Dying" would be the condition of most of my patients, but it was. I spent a lot of time in dark hospital rooms, just me and a dying patient, holding a hand or reading some Psalms or humming lullabies...trying to bring peace into what is, for some, a frightening transition. Because of HIPPA and other confidentiality mandates, I didn’t know how much of my experiences I could share publicly, especially during the weeks I was actually experiencing them. It’s alright to speak of them now, in the abstract as I’m doing here, but I cannot say much more. Watching a fellow human’s heart stop does something, psychologically, to a person. I don’t know if the effect is positive or negative or neutral, but it’s...something. You blink your eyes and the monitor flatlines--big red X’s next to “HR, BP,O2 sat%.” You can be taking a blood pressure and get a 0/0 reading; walk into a room to do some charting and hear a final breath. From a scientific and medical perspective, death makes perfect sense. When organs get old and/or sick, they get tired. The heart starts pumping really fast to try to get them more blood so that they’ll perk up. But a heart can’t sustain that sort of rapid rate for very long, and eventually it too will get so tired that it just has to quit. The lungs let out one last exhale and then blood flow ceases. When you see this process time and again, it is easily reduced to a simple and understandable physiologic process--as if bodies are machines with parts that are irreplaceable and eventually wear out. When we do postmortem care, it is obvious that there is a difference between those of us who are living and breathing and the body on the table. What's also obvious is that the difference isn’t merely physiological, it is clearly spiritual as well. That body is missing something those of us standing over it possess--more than a beating heart and working lungs, it is missing a soul. When I arrive home in the morning and shower by candelight and lay in bed recounting the night’s events, the spirituality of death and loss of life becomes clear in a way it hadn’t been while I was in the thick of the Care of the Dying, on hours 3, 8, 11 of shift. I’m able to think about it for a few moments before drifting off into a deep slumber to be awakened by my Forest Sounds alarm clock at 4:30 in the afternoon. Head back to the hospital and do it all over again. I don’t think I’ve adequately processed my experiences...and I’m not sure I ever will. What I am learning is that most humans live in a constant state of Much Unprocessed. There is simply not enough time to absorb, categorize, and understand all we see and do here on earth. We must keep putting one foot in front of the other to work hard, live well, and love WHOEVER is in front of us. We are more reslient than we know. We process what we can, and the rest we leave to God and ashes to ashes... It’s amazing to me that any of us get out of bed in the morning, to be honest, with all our internal battles and the heavy stuff we’ve experienced and never processed. Life takes its toll and then we...just keep on and keep on keeping on. I’m in a more joyful set of clinicals, right now. Helping mamas birth babies is my happy place. But I keep a little list in the back of the moleskine I carry around in the pocket of my scrubs--of those I’ve loved on and helped ease into the transition of eternity--to remind me that we’re all Actively Dying. Some more obviously than others, but each of us in time. One day my initials will be scrawled in the back of a book a twenty-something nursing student carries around in her back pocket: JR 1993-20__. The circle of life goes ‘round and round here on our little blue speck in the midst of the cosmos. And so as we actively die, we actively live...and we wait in hopeful anticipation for the day when All Things will be Restored to Glory, when death will cease and Life will Reign, and when Jesus Christ himself will be here to resurrect bodies and reunite them with souls. One more thing:
I have noticed a marked difference in the dying-experiences of those who believe in Jesus and have set their sights on an Heavenly eternity with Him...and those who do not know Jesus Christ and have not accepted His grace. This is not a scare-tactic; it is the truth, as I have seen it. The former often pass quietly and say things like: “I’m ready to be with my Lord.” The latter often describe flying bugs and hairy winged creatures...and the sensation of being strangled, unable to breathe, or horribly uncomfortable. This is a trend I’ve witnessed enough that I feel it is worth mentioning. You may have different experiences, and I believe you. I’m not here to discount anyone else’s testimonies of being with those who are dying...only to add my own to what is already being shared. Because I believe in a life after this one, it makes sense to me that those nearing the threshold may catch glimpses of it. I think the difference between the Glimpses is worth noting. Alas. Time to start winding down so I can get eight hours of shuteye in before getting up to catch the bus in the morning. May God continue to grant us all the strength to live life Unprocessed...and to trust that He holds the map to this jigsaw puzzle we mostly don’t understand. Grace and Peace.
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I have a to-do list in my Notes, and the very first item is “finish Mexico blog post.” It’s been there, at the top, for nearly a month now. I don’t know why I do not seem capable of sitting down and just finishing the thing, but alas. I’ve had the most wonderfully restful break here in the snowy little town that raised me, and tomorrow I fly back to Houston. The next time I’m back here, I will have graduated from college and will be a registered nurse. Being back has gotten me thinking a lot about time and how strange of a thing it is. I spent this morning with the moms of two old, dear, childhood friends. We talked some about the years they watched their kids and me grow up, but mostly we talked about all that has happened since then. I’ve been to Bible school and traveled Europe, spent two and a half years as a Baylor Bear, and started and nearly completed nursing school. I’ve dated a few guys and made lifelong friends; become a writer and a learner; taken up rock climbing and rowing; watched childhood friends get married and have babies of their own. And these moms’ kids--these old friends of mine--they’re both going to be nurses and one’s engaged and one is in a relationship with “a guy who is just the most beautiful person and treats her like a queen,” according to her mama. All these things, and many more, have happened and yet...I came back home today feeling as though the years since eighteen have been only a dream. I look back at old pictures--of camping trips and Shasta times and Serve LA and driving over the pass for sports and boating on Suttle and watching stars on docks and in fields and on barn roofs--and I feel like they were taken only yesterday. I have to intentionally remind myself of all that has happened in four years or else I find it all rather unbelievable. I KNOW the friends I made at Capernwray and Baylor and that I’ve almost got a degree and have lived halfway across the country from here for three years now, but when I’m back here all of that quickly fades and I feel as though I should be texting everyone to organize some night games and a good ol’ TP sesh. But then I drop my baby brother off at the high school and realize those who were freshmen when I was a senior graduated TWO YEARS AGO and that I now know zero of the kids inside. And when I stop by the middle school and see that the little toddlers I taught to swim are now sixth graders in Becky’s class...I realize that years really have passed. It’s amazing to me how old wounds can surface after any amount of time. Maybe as a melancholy temperament I experience this phenomenon more acutely than others do, or maybe most of us understand but rarely discuss it. I can go months, years, without thinking of certain people or events that hurt--and I can forgive and move on a thousand times--and still, the cracks in my heart can reopen in a single moment, as if they were fresh just yesterday and I’ve awoken this morning to reality all over again.
I broke down in tears today, "grown up" and alone on my little brother’s bed, over many things and people that have been lost. Over things that once were, and will never be again. Over friendships that were once deeper than family but are now as superficial as strangers. Over unanswered prayers and unrequited love and improper timings. I haven’t broken down like that in a very long time, but sometimes being back here and driving all the old roads and seeing the mountains and fields and fences again makes for a case of profound nostalgia. The truth is, time isn’t really real. Time is told by the seasons and the years, felt and expressed by our physical bodies, but our souls know no time. We were created for eternity, and from God’s view, every day is both yesterday and today and tomorrow. He sees the whole timeline from above; we see and feel from point to point. And so, our bodies and calendars tell us “four, ten, twenty-five, fifty years have gone,” and our souls say “it was all in the blink of an eye.” We are eternal at heart and made for forever. So, physical time doesn’t sit well with us, when we think about it too deeply. Just think: a sand-digger fly’s whole life is five minutes long. A mosquito lives ten days; a monarch butterfly less than a year. To me, a human who could potentially live more than a hundred years, five minutes is but a drop in the bucket; ten days a few blocks on this year’s calendar; a year only two semesters of school. But to that fly? Five minutes is a literal lifetime. An incredibly significant, not-one-second-wasted lifetime. And yet to us, decades whizz by. Old friends who haven’t seen each other since graduation “pick up like no time has passed;” lovers celebrating their 70th anniversary swear “they got married yesterday;” parents watch their babies walk across the graduation stage and think “just last week, they were in diapers.” The truth is, at twenty-two years old I have not prepared myself to watch doors shut, to see friends and family get sick and die, to lose those I love. During childhood, it’s easy to believe that “everything will stay just like this.” All the doors will always be open, the world will always be an oyster, nothing will ever be permanent. But the truth is that, on earth, there is permanence. I’m sure many of you had that figured out long before 22, but that reality is only just now becoming clear to me. I am so thankful I believe in eternity. To believe that these months, days, years are the end-all-be-all would be such a frustrating endeavour. It would mean that wounds that have not healed by the time I die will remain forever unhealed--that some of the wrong I’ve done and not been forgiven for would just be over and done, without resolution. But I believe in a God who is in the business of redeeming and restoring and righting. He has put eternity in our souls--allowed us to feel these aches as time passes--to show us that we have been created for more than a timeline with an end date. When we look in the mirror and see wrinkling skin and greying hair but our spirits feel sixteen and free...He wants us to embrace that disconnect. It’s a disconnect that draws us to Him because we cannot make sense of it and must trust that He can, and has. And, it is true, that some of my friends will be my friends forever. Eternally. I texted Trent, as I was crying, and said: “I’m glad we’re forever friends.” “Forever and ever. I hurt with you.” “Thanks; it’s the best anyone can do.” “It’s a hurt I still hurt.” “We can’t fix each other’s hurts, usually. And God doesn’t usually fix them either. But He’s with us. And, likewise, we can be with each other.” “Just bear a bit of each other’s burdens.” “Yep, that’s Galatians.” “Yep.” “xoxo” “Walk alongside.” “Amen.” And so, as I find time to be such a strange and unreal thing, it stirs a disconnect between my calendar & body and my soul, and that disconnect draws me back to friends and family, and to Jesus. I’m thankful for the assurance of eternity...where broken hearts will be made whole and tears will be wiped from eyes by our God, who loves us and is whispering however softly and through whatever painful disconnects “there is so much more than this...wait, and see.” |
hey, i'm jordan.wife to one, mama to four, bible-believing christian. Archives
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