For The Someday Book

The last post I wrote–not counting the eulogy for my dad–happened all the way back in January, just before surgery. In that reflection, I talked about how I kept moving forward, forward, forward, but my emotional and spiritual healing would require time to stop moving and even look backward, reflecting on all that I have been through. I had been too busy coping with the physical work of healing to attend to other matters. My silence here reveals I still haven’t managed to do that yet.

Since that last post, I had surgery, and discovered that the muscles for typing were the exact muscles that needed to rest during my recovery. My computer use was limited to the bare minimum. Then, before I was fully recovered, my father died, and the world began to spin again. I went home to Virginia for ten days, and returned to the start of Lent and the start of daily radiotherapy, which ran for nearly the same 40 days until Easter. Each day was truncated by radiotherapy, which sent me home to sleep immediately after, and my desire to honor holy week in my new church took all my working energy.

After Easter, I had planned to slow down and let the feelings come. I made intentional efforts to carve out spacious days with time to write. I had a trip to a seven-day conference in Vienna and Bratislava, and told everyone (including myself) that I planned to spend hours alone, writing and praying and processing.

Regents Park, on one of my long walks in London

Instead, I kept moving. Literally. One day in Bratislava, I planned to sit in a cafe and write. Instead, walked around town for nearly five hours, never even stopping for water. Here in London, I set out to walk to a coffee shop to sit and write, and end up walking and walking instead, until my feet are blistered and I’m too tired to shape thoughts and feelings into words. It has happened over and over. Yesterday, I cleaned all the things. Since starting this post, I have paid bills and started laundry and dealt with a pile of unread e-mail. I have to meet my guys at the baseball field this afternoon, and I just learned I could walk there in less than 90 minutes. I considered stopping this post so I could do that instead.

During that epic walk in Bratislava, I stopped at the Coronation Church to pray, and shed a few tears for my Dad. This guy walked in wearing a Rotary backpack. Being a Rotarian was a huge part of my dad’s life. This stranger felt heaven sent, and I wept some more.

I think I have been a bit starved for seeing things, after treatment left my world so small for so long. My walks have always been full of interesting things to see—beauty and humanity and energy. But I am the kind of person who needs to move beyond so many stimuli and process all that my senses encounter. Rather than pause to reflect, I have been walking myself so much that I come home too tired to do anything beyond watching TV and scrolling through Facebook—an exact replica of all the nights I’ve had through cancer treatments. Numb and exhausted, unable to concentrate and focus.

It’s probably good for my physical health to be walking so much, and I am using the time to think and pray, but I also feel like I just don’t know how to stop moving. I want to rest, to dig deeper, to feel my feelings and write my story again–but my feet keep moving.

I first realized the pattern after that day in Bratislava, but I didn’t know how to stop. For well more than a year now, since we first knew we were moving to London, life has been lived in a rush. There were visa applications and a house to sell, goodbyes to make and a church to transition. Then, just when I thought I could rest, a cancer diagnosis. What followed has been a crush of a new church, new job and new culture amidst chemo, surgery, radiotherapy and all the rest. Then the sudden death of my father.

Through it all, I knew I had to keep moving forward, and I did. Now my feet–and with them my mind and heart–don’t know how to rest anymore. I’ve lost my habits of reflection, my patterns of withdrawal, my mental space for writing more than sermons (and even concentrating on those has been a struggle). In order to renew them, I am starting writing by talking about how hard it is to write. It’s all I can manage right now.

Inside the Karlskirche, awaiting the Requiem

I am aware, too, that my feet may be in motion to run away from some of these feelings, because grief is big and deep and scary sometimes. But I have been allowing space for lots of feelings, especially for my dad. In Vienna, I attended a concert of Mozart’s Requiem in the Karlskirche. The Requiem has always been a piece that opened my heart to grief. As soon as I saw it advertised, the tears came. I knew I needed to go, and to use the music to let the feelings flow. I wept for the entire concert, and it was just what I needed. I pause for tears on a regular basis, so I don’t feel like my feelings are locked away from me.

I found these (very old) tissues in my dad’s briefcase, which had always been sacred space off-limits to the rest of us. I held on to them, along with some terribly old Altoids. I took them with me to Vienna, and to the Requiem, and it felt like my dad was there to catch my tears for him.

In the next two weeks, I am facing some time alone. Starting this morning, while the guys are at baseball. Then, three days, two nights home alone for the first time in more than a year. Then four days for a wedding in France, where I won’t know anyone apart from the bride, groom and rabbi. All those days fall around the one year anniversary of both leaving my church and home in Jeffersonville, and finding my cancer.

Normally, I would be fiercely protective of this time, with a long list of writing and thinking projects to tackle and a great eagerness for being alone. Not this time. I am nervous, because I won’t have any distractions or excuses. I think all my loneliness from the last year might catch up to me. My fear is that I’ll just keep busy, keep moving, keep walking—and spend all that precious time alone watching TV and scrolling Facebook again.

After the Requiem, I went out with friends and ordered an Old Granddad, my dad’s choice for bourbon when out to eat. He was also called Granddaddy by his grandchildren. Sipping bourbon is a slow burn, exactly the right speed for what I need right now.

But now I’ve managed to make it almost to the end of my first reflective writing in nearly six months. It’s nothing much, but I’m hoping it relieves the pressure to make way for some more writing to come, and reminds me of how much I miss it.

I want to go back to being myself again—and I don’t. I want to be changed by this experience—and I don’t. I should be different, shouldn’t I? Aren’t I? I’m only beginning to understand how my new country, new pastoral role and new status as cancer survivor will change me, and that’s all happening at the exact same time that I am finally feeling well enough to get back to being myself again. Only “myself” isn’t quite there anymore. I believe it’s writing that will help me find my footing again.

I am so glad to be through the worst of the cancer treatment, to feel my strength returning and exhaustion lifting. I look forward to slowing down my feet and the rest of me, so that I can also return to creativity, reflection and concentration. In all this, God has never felt far away, and for that I am most grateful. I hope it’s five days, not five months, until I am able to write again.