safe deposit box

it was mid-afternoon on a tuesday. i answered my cell phone and very calmly my dad at the other end said, "i think you need to come now." i drove home to collect some things in a bag, and i remember how absurd it felt as i placed my black funeral dress and heels inside it just in case my brother didn't make it. 4 1/2 hours later i pulled into the parking deck of mission hospital in asheville. my dad called again as i was walking into the lobby and said where to find everyone, that they were all just sitting there in the waiting room on the 4th floor, but he gave no indication that anything was any different than when i spoke to him earlier. the doors of the elevator opened and over the hospital intercom a "code blue" was being called. doctors and nurses were running down the hallway and i almost collided into one as i stepped off. i could also hear the intense wailing and sobbing of someone off in the distance. i rounded the corner and at the end of the hallway i saw my dad trying to hold my stepmother up onto her feet as her weight was crumbling in agony against him towards the floor. i then made the connection that the wailing i'd just heard wasn't a poor stranger's...it was hers...and that the code blue was in my brother's room. his heart had stopped at the same second the bell of the elevator dinged. i froze and then took a step forward to enter a chaos that will never seem any less surreal as long as i live. the sounds accompanying that moment and my body shaking due to my heart pounding with such force will be forever burned in my memory. she was still wailing, "oh God, oh God, no!". my dad released her from his grip long enough so that he could crumble too, and then it was my arms she fell into. with both my bags still on my shoulders all i knew to do was just hold her while she wailed and say "it's OK, it's OK, its OK" over and over like i believed it was going to be. i yelled at my aunt to sit with my dad because his red face and sweat told me that he too may have a heart attack if we didn't calm him. and then just as fast as the chaos had begun, an icu nurse burst through the automatic doors and said they'd gotten josh's heart back to a rhythm. i think my stepmom had wailed out all the energy she had because all she could do was sit wide-eyed and motionless at the news that she hadn't just lost her only son afterall.

the realization that i've become a shell of a person, and that it's no one's fault but my own, sinks like a brick of panic in my gut. i use the word fault loosely, realizing that life just happens, but regardless of that fact no one is responsible for who, or what, i become but me. i don't want to be 45 and wondering where the last twenty years of my life went simply because i was too scared to leap. because i was too afraid to be happy. happy like "my cup runneth over" kind of happy. life is shorter than short; it's sometimes unpredictable and not to be put in some safe deposit box for tomorrows. because what if? what if one day you're not so lucky to just be the one getting out of the elevator?

in the balance

you think you know yourself well enough to know how you'll feel about something...until you have to. my entire life up until this point has been purposed by the same recurring theme: find balance, and maintain it. but what do you do when even equilibrium becomes too much? when you'd give just about anything for the scale to tip slowly over in an actual direction..any direction? instead, it hangs there...bobbing in midair...teasing fate like a donut on a string to a fat kid.

my brother's fate lies in the 4th floor icu of mission hospital, a road map of lines and tubes, and one life supporting machine after another running out of it to an unknown point out in the future somewhere. a point we hold our breath to for fear of also possibly finding out. i've never hated balance so much until now, nor do i find it amusing that the one time it has been the most tangible is also when it's the ugliest and least wanted.

and until now, i have never been ashamed that i would be willing to let someone go just to be able to have my feet touching the ground again. i want to scream out in sally field-like furor an earth-shattering 'why', only i know that as long as questions hang there silently in the balance their answers will too.

thread

around the table at a restaurant in downtown London sit a small group consisting of several Brits, a Serbian woman, an Irish woman, 3 Italians, a German, and 3 Americans. as bottles of wine, various tapas dishes, and “walked into a bar” jokes are being passed around, I sit in astute observation, for it feels oddly reminiscent of a bag of Scrabble pieces. you reach in, pull out a handful of letters, each with different number values (which, for the sake of argument here, would be the different nationalities and geographical locations). in the end, though, each letter comes together to form the same word. this theme is on my mind a lot, actually, but never have I witnessed it in such a refreshing, outright manner: no matter where we come from in this life or where each of our fibers began, the one connecting thread is that we are all simply trying to live our best lives. essentially, to make the best of the mixed bag we’re given. so much of this world contains a conscious focus on the numerous ways one group is set apart from the rest. yet as the laughter and affection pass through this table from one end to the other like a current, what I also witness reaches much farther than any longitude or latitude could ever stretch. in this world we are all so much more similar than we ever are different. the Irish woman next to me throws back her head with a hearty chuckle at the most climactic part of her story, simultaneously patting my back and grabbing my arm. as she does so, a wide grin spreads on my face from one cheekbone to the next, but not from how charming her story happens to be – which it indeed is. rather, the smile is more or less the recognition of the moment itself, that here deep in the basement of a Spanish restaurant in a continent resting in far away coordinates, one kind soul feels the same value in another and it isn’t remotely dependent upon which brogue we happen to speak. she pours wine into my glass and we clink them in cheers to what would be another round of many that evening, both of us thankful to feel a sense of home far away from the one we typically know.

hearts and lungs

10:30 at night in the lobby of Duke University Medical Center, a security guard sat at a shiny, black piano and tickled the keys quietly to himself. hidden by the lit christmas tree beside him and the sterile odor of sickness, procedure, and loneliness, i believe i may have been the only one who even noticed his notes or the way he bowed his head to his chest slightly as he played. i stepped off the visitor's elevator on the 8th floor and headed to the wing where its' sickest patients lie fighting for their next seconds, some consciously but most of them not. she emerged from the heavy double doors with tired eyes, blue scrubs, and a mask draped loosely around her ears, for she is the one who fights with them and for them. she grinds through 12 blood and fluid-filled hours so that they may experience even just 12 more pain-free seconds in this world. and though i didnt know exactly how capable my heart was, in that moment it let go a tad bit more. if the sick can trust her with their weakened, diseased hearts, then i can open my slightly battered one.

back down in the lobby, the tired pianist gone, the silence gave way to the late night hours, the doors parted, and i greeted the cold air. i could see my own breath hanging in clouds against the chill and noted how very different the simple act of my own breathing was compared to the belabored, manufactured breaths of ventillators in the world i left her with upstairs. i knew that in a few hours she would be able to go home regardless of how many of the sick weren't saved, and we would would feel every bit of the weight that luck carries with it.

passenger seat

he's a pulpit preacher. he slaps bibles and reaches out to shake an entire congregation's hands every sunday morning and it is clear by that alone just how far apart our two worlds reside. most of our conversations could follow a checklist they are so surface level and predicted, for in our opposing worlds ignorance is more blissful than the collisions they could create. often when we visit one another he is so consumed with thoughts of his next sermon or church obligation that all other tangibles seem to whiz right by unnoticed.

sometimes though, on his way home alone in his car, he will call me because he says he was just thinking about me. he will ask me about my day and it is then that he isn't a preacher anymore, he's my daddy. in those moments he's the silly, affectionate man that i remember would play tricks on me while we were driving to the store, me his little co-pilot in the passenger seat. i would be looking out the window lost in my own thought and imagination and out of nowhere as an oncoming car began to pass by he would grab my hand, hold it up in the air, and shake it wildly as if i were waving to the car myself. i'd follow that up with a "daaaadddy!", crossing my arms in fake irriation, but i loved every second of it. even now at 29 years old, a slightly older co-pilot, i sit in anticipation waiting for him to grab my hand to wave it, and he will gladly oblige. we'll both chuckle emphatically as if i'm still six years old and falling for it for the first time, and as if it's still the best trick in the book.

this is how i know that regardless of the number of sermons he gives, or the number i don't attend, he'll always be my daddy and i'll always be the little girl in that passenger seat.

other side of the world

it's a tuesday night, not unlike any other. tonight, though, i delayed pressing the power button on the tv remote for a reason i wasn't quite sure of until i found myself sitting quietly on my front stoop in the dark. the lone street light in front of my house illuminated the two rows of neighboring lives, presiding over the routines and evening activities each house contained inside. tvs flickered inside shade-drawn windows, dogs barked in fenced-in backyards, and cars rushed by on their routes home from work. home to catch dinner before it got cold, or to embrace children and spouses at front doors. as i sat, i took note of how crisp and cool the air felt as faint chills crept slowly upon the skin on my arms and i warmed them back and forth with my palms. the electricity of a September evening such as this showed evidence of one season's quiet exiting and its' replacement having its own, different energy. at the train station several blocks away, the boxcars passing through sounded their whistle of hello, as if they also noticed the air's crispness and were calling out to it. i thought of places and far off lands and then remembered the times as a little girl when i would ride my bike all around what felt like the entire globe to such a tiny view-finder, yet was probably only 2 or 3 streets. after my explorations, i'd park my bike at the end of our cul-de-sac and sit on its' red rubber seat dreaming of the little girl on the other side of the world i was so sure was doing the exact same thing at that very moment. i would talk to her as if she were merely sitting across from me indian-style, not continents away. even then, i seemed to understand the idea that we are all so connected as humans that our individual moments could collectively collide at precisely the same time. at least i hoped they did from time to time. the truth in that thought less important, of course, than perhaps the necessary belief in connections outside ourselves. that is, afterall, what it means to believe in something, worldly or other-worldly, spiritual or non-spiritual. food for thought, as the night crickets chirped like the hands of a clock sounding down the day which was nearing closer to the next.

beauty in the equation

life is short. i hope i've just stated the obvious. a tad less obvious, however, is the divine chaos it all contains. chaos because alot of what life throws in our direction is uncontrollable by us, seeming random at best and largely frenetic at worst. divine, though, because there has to be some larger reason for it all that exists outside just what is visible. personally speaking, i'd much rather believe that busted moments and bruised spirits happen for a reason other than "just because." i'm able to wrap my mind around injustice and pain a little easier if it seems they are just tiny stops along a much more purposed journey. especially when unexplainable heartache finds its way to very good-hearted, beautiful people. otherwise, the only question that can ever be asked is "why?", with empty justifications to follow. and that, to me, is just not good enough.

life is indeed chaotic; it's unfair, confusing, and much of it is blind. but it is also the sum of all its parts and we live each day because of the simple, crucial hope that in the end there has been more beauty in the equation than anything else.