This is a synopsis of five years. It has taken me two days to write this, because honestly, even sharing this much of the story brings me to a very emotional place. I still have a hard time accepting how life is different—how I am different—since the day I woke up with a pain in my back that turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. Even though many good things have come in the midst of this five-year season, I continue to struggle with lingering grief, the internal wrestling that happens when a small, finite mind grapples with the audacious love of God that rescues and restores me. I’m the best kind of wrecked, and also, that wrecked part is not hyperbole. So here is the story by year.
Year One
I am a thriving mom with a lot going for me. I am surprise pregnant with my seventh baby, which I’m thrilled about. I wake up on a normal Saturday morning with just a small, weird pain that I think is going to resolve itself if I stretch or sit with good posture for a bit. The pain doesn’t go away. Days go by, and I feel progressively worse, just a bit at a time, slow enough that I am not alarmed, just less available to my family. It hurts the most to lie down, so I sit upright, both for daytime and nighttime hours.
It’s bad enough by Wednesday that I decide to see a massage therapist to see if we can figure this thing out. I’m still convinced its a muscular thing. She fits me in on Friday and I go in for the appointment expecting to be healed. It almost feels worse when the hour is over. I cry all the way home. On Saturday and Sunday, I do nothing. I am finding it a little hard to breathe, and I have a cough here and there. I cough up a little bit of blood and its so weird, I can’t barely register that it happened. It’s the weekend, and I decide I will call on Monday. Then I cough up blood—a lot more of it—again. I still do not go to the ER because I am an idiot and I think it will be less disruptive to my family if I just go to our family doc on Monday morning.
Family doc sends me straight to the ER on Monday morning, says do not drive home whatever you do. I fret about my children at home and being an imposition on my friend who is watching them, but I go like he says. The ER is expecting me, and I bypass all the other patients, going straight back for evaluation. The staff wastes no time. I do not understand what is at stake, but I am glad to be somewhere that people can figure me out. When they tell me what it is—a blood clot in my lung—I am frozen. I don’t really feel fear because I don’t really know how close to death I came. It takes me a whole year before I can really say out loud that I almost died.
The whole year is a shock. I do the recommended treatment, and see doctors several times a week. I sleep upright on the couch for five months. I withdraw from most relationships because I can’t function. I feel a kind of lonely I hope to never feel again. I do everything I can to have a healthy pregnancy that yields a healthy baby. He is born on a Sunday morning and I have never had a more peaceful birth. I think the struggle, this terrible year, is over, but I am wrong.
Year Two
This year ends up being a couple levels harder. There are more unfortunate surprises for me, including my nervous system lighting on fire. I begin having panic attacks that drop me to the floor in public places, and I am mortified that I cannot control them. I cry all the time. I cannot tell when I will be able to fulfill a commitment or complete a task because the episodes arrive without warning. I have a hard time explaining what is going on because I, myself, do not know. I don’t like to ask for help, but I am at the point where I can’t actually do anything that is needed for myself if I don’t get help. I start with counseling, and I’m convinced that God puts me in the practice of the one person who can get me to a place of equilibrium faster than anyone else can. Counseling helps me so much. So much. I feel foolish that I ever dismissed it earlier in my life. I experience a serious amount of inner healing over months of time, and when I am done, I am somehow still at the beginning of the journey and will be unpacking things for years ahead.
Year Three
We move out of the rental we have lived in for ten years. The move takes us across the state, in a nice neighborhood, and I am relieved to be away from the embattled area we left. I need respite in the worst way, and I find it—just enough to unwind the hyper-vigilance and tight grip I’d been muscling for the previous two years. I sit on the back porch in a reclining lawn chair with a blanket over me, the trees above and butterflies traveling past me. Tears stream down my cheeks regularly, but I think they’re good tears this time. Mostly. Like tears of relief. I feel like maybe this could be, finally, the end of the struggle, but I am wrong.
I cannot sleep for months. I have weird physical symptoms I can’t explain and every time one pops up, anxiety spikes and holds me by the neck, keeping me awake for way too long. It’s always at night, torment that keeps me from any meaningful rest. My nervous system is on overdrive and I weep nearly all the time. This is the tail end of 2020, so things are weird in the world on top of everything else. No one knows me in our new city. I am embarrassed to let them know me while I’m so out of sorts. I am trying to find my way out of the struggle, doing every last thing I can to be at peace. I walk every day, sometimes several miles. I talk to my far away friends on the phone and they comfort me. They do not make me feel like a loser, even though that is what I feel like. They tell me true things and I believe them.
My husband’s company is acquired and within a very short time, all our existing debts (which were many) are paid in full. We have a down payment for a house. We choose a five acre farm, private sale, and have no idea what is in store for us. The good kind of surprise this time.
I can’t believe there is so much space. The land is more beautiful than I ever dared to hope for. We can spread out, and we do. We get our first chickens from a friend, and she hatches a perfect seven of them, which my kids quickly decide that there is one for each of them. They are given names. Belle, Gertrude, Strike, Aqua, Darling, Beef, and Peep. We don’t know until much later that six of them are roosters. This is the first of a hilarious number of animals to come to the farm.
Year Four
Life on the farm is good. More animals arrive. Some pigs first, then more chickens, ducks, cats, and some others. I lose track of the timeline honestly. My husband makes a personal goal to raise all our own meat by next year. We raise 200 meat chickens. If you are thinking to yourself, that is a lot of meat chickens for first-timers, you would be right. But he butchers them all himself, and goes on to also butcher the first of our pigs. He doesn’t totally know what he’s doing, but YouTube has helped a bit, and the guy has yet to meet a challenge he doesn’t figure out somehow. It’s the best meat we’ve ever eaten. If you do not currently buy meat from a local regenerative farmer, this is an invitation to discover the difference.
I have my first taste of growing things from seed. I don’t know why we make our first garden the size of a football field (well, larger than that even? I don’t know. Math is not my strong suit). I am dazzled by the process of a tiny seed coming up out of the dirt, how it grows, how fruit grows on it. It’s like I know this is what God is doing in me, and it gives me hope. He is raising me out of the dirt, showing me His mysteries while I am in the dirt.
My family is doing really well, but I am personally still crawling along. I have good days and new dreams, but I am still hitting some major limitations. I am still weeping often. I am still feeling like I cannot really let people know me in this condition. I am sleeping better, but there are rough patches. I am honestly exhausted, not just physically, but the down in the bones kind. I tell a friend I have this vision of a woman who goes out from her house, walking through fields and forests to the edge of a loud, raging river. The sound of the water crashing over rocks is loud enough to drown out the sound of this woman wailing, weeping, crying out in the most undignified way, aiming her grief and struggle to the great and deep, where there are arms wide enough to receive what no one else can stand to hear. Her pain is expressed with unguarded honesty and she cries aloud until she completely exhausted. Until she is laid out on the grass, emptied of all she has been keeping inside. Then she stands up, smooths her dress, and wipes her tears, and goes back inside her home to make dinner. This woman is me. Not literally of course. But she’s still me.
Year Five
Many things have smoothed out and I have more peace than ever, but I still feel fragile. I am finding my footing, and the terrible days happen less often. I am opening up. Blooming, maybe. I try not to be embarrassed that it has taken me “this long” to get over what has happened, but I do feel like I should be somewhere further, somewhere more steady than were I am. But also, the strength I now have is not my own. It’s coming from somewhere else, and I like it. I realize I do not have to hold myself up. He will hold me. I do not have to race ahead or push the pace. I am still trying to accept that weakness is, or maybe can be, a grace and an invitation to lean harder on God until I really get it. That this is what He has wanted for me all along. To trust Him. To rely on Him. To accept that His strength is made perfect in my weakness and His grace is sufficient.