I haven't really cried in two weeks.
It is refreshing to not feel like my emotions are on high alert all the time. During my internship I encountered such sadness and such loneliness that I cried often. I would cry on my way to and from work. I would cry with Waylon. I would cry in the shower.
I was dealing with such emotional weight. Such despair. I was seeing men and women sick and I was seeing men and women at their final moments. Often I was paged to pray over men and women who were in there last day of life.
I was angry as well as sad. It didn't seem fair. I would sit and talk with hospice patients and it was like I was seeing everything in slow motion. I would think as I sat, how many more times will they sit here and talk about their week? How many more times will they eat their favorite meal? How many more times will they kiss their wife goodnight?
These questions would weigh so heavily on my heart. I would smile and continue to talk with them but on the inside I was grieving for them. I was mourning their shortened life. I saw everything through that lens. I so desperately tried to see every situation in a different light, but I still came back to the reality that each person I visit is going die within the next few weeks, if not sooner. I still came back to the reality that the family that so cherished this person is going to loose them.
And then my internship ended. I walked away on a Friday and I have not been back. It was all very anti climatic really. I started moving, I finished up my college classes, I continued to do things for my wedding. It was like the last four months had been a dream, and I suddenly woke up.
The three or four days after my internship I stayed in bed. I was exhausted. It had felt like I had just been in immense battle for the last four months. Like I had traveled by boat and fought through tenuous situations to come back home. I have never really felt that way.
I got my energy back up and started to live my life again. I went to Naperville to do some wedding stuff with my mom and some of the women who work with her kept asking if I was nervous for my wedding. One woman actually told me, "that I looked really put together" compared of course to my impending decision in two weeks to wed.
I didn't really say this then, but I wanted too. I wanted to say, after the last four months, after all the death, and the sorrow, and the sadness, after all the situations where you depend solely on what you have learned to get you through the hard questions. After the battle, a celebration seems easy. Yes there are nerves, and we want everything to go as planned, but it almost seems simple compared to the complexity of the dying.
I am excited to get married. I am thankful for those who have helped along the way, especially my mom, who has been absolutely wonderful. But, I know better. I know that this day is more about the celebration of two individuals joining together than it is about who gets to sit where at the reception.
Waylon is the man who will take care of me when I am in that final stage of life. I am that women who has made the commitment to do the same. Everyone should be loved until the end even if the sorrow is great and the sadness is overbearing. It seems ironic that my internship was full of sickness and death and my life is heading towards newness. Four months of sorrow and death in preparation for a new life. There is some kind of contrast that needs to be seen in all of this. Marriage is not a trivial life situation that one can get in and out of. It is a life long commitment that acquires a sense of understanding even in great sorrow.
I know better now, than to get caught up in the trivial pursuits of this life. I have seen and witnessed to the end and I will continue to live my life out in such a way that is a testimony to the eternal life compared to the passing one we all live. Movies, songs, and pictures do not capture death appropriately.
Death is not beautiful.
Don't mock life in such a way to say that death is beautiful. When we believe that we stain life with such hypocrisy. When we stop crying we forget the pain and the sorrow that reminds us life is different. Death happens once. Life happens every day that we are given. Do not throw mud at the life you are given. If you do than you are already dead.
