Keeping on Nodding Terms With Our Dead Darlings

It’s two weeks out from my birthday, which marks five years since the day a dialogue began between my now-husband and me. A most elaborate birthday gift if I do say so myself. Still in the infancy of marriage (sixteen months), five years feels like room enough for us to have suffered through five whole lives and five whole separate deaths and that’s probably about true. Hopefully more than that, I suppose, if we’re speaking in terms of “absolute being” and necessary expirations for the ones on their way to it.

(I hope my saying this doesn’t communicate to whoever might be reading that a relationship which turned to marriage is the single avenue for necessary dying. It isn’t. If you’re breathing, you’re sinful and Christ is working to draw you to Himself, and dying will happen, not as punishment but reconciliation. I’m only using this example, because I’ve had more of my sin exposed and survived more tiny deaths over the course of five years and have witnessed it doubly so as I continue to know Ryan).

I was telling him a day or so ago that something’s come over me recently and the something is that I don’t feel scared about real death like I used to. I’m not sure what birthed it, this epiphany, and if this turns out to be a weird, archived premonition, well then, tell my dog I loved him, er – love him.

I certainly don’t welcome the end or wish it, and I’m not unwell by society’s current standards. I only know for sure that it was once my deepest burden – the fear of my time being up with an armful of gifts the world hadn’t yet received – and now it’s not. I practice communion, obedience, faithfulness, and the world needs nothing else from me. My arms are empty and I give only what I have this day and this moment, grateful that the Lord resides in the land of plenty and is not stingy. Perhaps all this earthly dying has laid before me like a hall of mirrors how little each unfinished me has brought to the table. And perhaps it’s this humble prelude that practices us and prompts us to say, “I believe. Help me in my unbelief” as we inch toward its permanent and more comprehensive counterpart, depending on how much stake you have in what’s coming. For me, a people restored of all sad things and no more dying.

Unfortunately, as the world spins and we chug along – passing away and again living only a fraction better than we were before – we’re reminded and painfully about the first one-hundred lives and our heels that dragged in the gravel to be sinful and broken still. If I’m going to die (whether by choice or by grace) let her at the least be gone so I can go on independently unbothered. But she’s there in the funhouse multiplied, wearing the young face of perfectionism and, to my left, an older, fuller one of isolation and cynicism. Behind me, apathy and more of it. Each of them is there, not entirely, but until I’m at last done with the dying, they get to hang around. That’s part of the deal, and I’m sort of glad for it lately.

Christians in church (well-meaning) often stand completely on the coverage of our sins. We accept one new life in Christ and thereby discard each of our previous selves as they produce too much shame and condemnation. “My past doesn’t define me” or “I’m not who I once was before Jesus.” All of these new creation adages are fine and true, but might we be doing a disservice to the coming you and I’s by resenting or avoiding altogether the ones that walked before? I don’t know.

I got really jealous again the other day. Going mad at the irrational possibilities. I felt the train wreck on its way, triggered by a bout of inadequacy or fear of abandonment or my period. Either way, I ended up in the mirrored room at eye-level with the one who died once due to trust in man, and she retaught me about how misplaced or displaced trust is a foundation not built to last.

I speak poorly to Ryan in efforts to make him hear. I feel unheard and severely misunderstood. And then, offered up to me is one who died during another lesson in pride. She doesn’t rub my nose in it – that I had failed him again as a nurturing wife – but cautions me against the manmade and entitled right to be heard and to be understood. It’s only an injection of the Spirit that compels people to understand.

Having these is not a handicap or a haunting. It’s a grace that I’m insurmountably grateful for, to accept forgiveness as a blanket but to also confide in the ones that have failed me. To conspire together about what went wrong and what is being made right at every turn. After all, our greatest teacher is Christ in us, by us, through us. I will not make a name for myself by my sin alone, but I will use it as it’s there until it’s not any longer.

Revered mystic and the first known female writer in English, Saint Julian of Norwich, said this something like six-hundred and fifty years ago: “Sin is behovely (useful), but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” None of us here enjoy a thousand sinful ghosts riding our coattails to the next, but if it’s necessary carpool for all manner of things to be well three times over, then I think that’s an alright trade, don’t you?

Ryan and I started five years ago what would carry on as one long conversation, and in it, a million tiny deaths. In the past year, post-covenant, our exchange has wandered closer to the likes of sex, hospitality, the dog, and bills. Sometimes it’s empty, shallow, sometimes it’s silent, and sometimes we wrestle to fill that space, which is mostly and usually unhelpful. And sometimes, on nights like last night, we wind up beneath the debris of a good old-fashioned fight; letting tears dry up slowly on our faces as we talk about our current death and the mystery of God. The Great Equalizer. The middle sphere in Newton’s cradle. And about how only something genius and good would kill off our favorite darlings and let them cheer us on forward to more abundant life.

Death will happen when we least expect it and when we most expect it, not one time but many, and I’m going to need my whole unruly bunch – until all manner of things is well and until they’re buried for good.