Back To Brighter Days
Listening
In my last blog post I shared some pretty intimate details about the struggles Sharon and I are going through right now. I know most people don’t want to hear much about the dark times in other peoples’ lives, but I heard from a number of my readers that I was not totally clear last time about what’s going on for us, especially for my dear wife Sharon.
Over the last months, she has been hit with the awful disturbances of anxiety. We’re learning a lot about this illness. When these moments come they seem to upset everything, our ordinary patterns of life, her notions of what’s real, even causing questions how clearly our faith squares with all the pain.
Sharon and I have never dealt with mental illness up close, but we are coming to realize how many people suffer from just these things: anxiety, depression, addiction, deep wounds that can come from way back in our childhood, loneliness, isolation, fear that sweeps over a person like the dark of night. Add to these things, of course, attacks of vicious cancers, challenges of mobility and hearing and sight and memory, the loss of loved ones, even the enormous pressures of a turbulent, unsteady world.
Of course we have, appropriately, sought help for Sharon, from hospitals, doctors, meds, and all the rest. These have been helpful, necessary. Most of all, as I said last week, we have received the blessing of new love for each other, love from our family and from so many friends scattered about. This love has brought hope of healing. Healing begins with love, we’ve found.
One of my blog readers sent an attachment of a David Brooks article on how to be a friend when someone you love is consumed by depression. If you want to know something of what we are experiencing, I encourage you to read it here.
Brooks calls his experience
a hard education with no panaceas.
I learned, very gradually, that a friend’s job in these circumstances is not to cheer the person up. It’s to acknowledge the reality of the situation; it’s to hear, respect and love the person; it’s to show that you haven’t given up on him or her, that you haven’t walked away.
While I’ve devoted my life to words, I increasingly felt the futility of words to help Pete in any meaningful way. The feeling of impotence was existential.
Hard lessons, indeed. Sharon and I concur. But where do we go from here? I’ve always been compelled to be unreservedly hopeful, because that is what my faith in Jesus calls me to become. I am also told by the teaching of my faith that we will find ourselves, at some point in our lives, slogging our way along the murky path of the valley of the shadow of death. I have no desire to talk too much about this dark valley, but only as I think Sharon’s experience, and my reflections, might be helpful to others. I can’t believe how many people we know who find themselves on this path or find their loved ones suffering in this way.
I’m not at all an answer-guy here. I am searching and struggling with the rest of you. But Sharon is a fighter, as I am sure most of you are. Her kindness and courage and goodness shines through each day. She has a lot of love to spread around. Through Jesus Christ, we can find resurrection into new life, right now. That’s not an abstraction. We will get through this. Our lives may be changed, but the light of this resurrection will shine in the darkness and the darkness will not overcome it.
We sense there is much in this darkness that will be good for us, dropping our pretenses that we are in control of everything, dropping so many of the ego needs that distort what matters in our lives. And love is at the center of our dark journey. I will forever believe that this dear, precious woman to whom I have been married for fifty-nine years, will know she is the beloved of God, made in God’s image, and loved by me and so many others. That love is the starting point for rebuilding our lives on a rock and not on shifting sands.