Twenty-Seven Days

(Oriinally posted on my facebook page on October 24, 2008. I wrote this for myself and several friends, some that knew Emily and some that didn't. I haven't written much lately, except for them. I'm ready to post this here, though, too.)

It has been one month, four weeks tomorrow since we lost Emily. I cannot quite believe that taking one day at a time has lead up to twenty-seven of them. It feels like it just happened, and yet I don’t think I would recognize my old self anymore. I haven’t decided yet if I miss the old Abi. . . but for better or for worse—she’s gone. The new Abi. . . well . . . she’s not a lot of fun right now, but she’s certainly interesting. It’s strange—I’m learning more about the old Abi now that there’s a new one replacing her . . . the old Abi talked casually a whole lot more than the new one. That was one of the first things that people noticed, and I noticed too. “Why are you so quiet?” they would ask. I didn’t feel like talking just to talk. I’ve found that, when I am with my close friends, I ask more questions than before. I have so much I want to know about them. Questions that hadn’t seemed so pressing before that I want to understand now about their lives, and thoughts, and the directions they were each heading. I iniciate conversations that had intimidated me before. Instead of shying away from questions I “don’t know how to ask,” I give it a shot and work my way from there. It’s fulfilling. I feel more contented with the time I have, more powerfully present. The people in my life seem more real in their own right, and less the scenery around the edges of my own story. I am grateful for this fuller life. I have always wondered what I would do if I knew that I would not have another chance to talk to someone I loved. If I SAW the end coming, what would I want to leave them with? Nothing ever felt big enough, so the hypothetical answers always turned out to be sappy, melodramatic, and embarressing—far too embarressing to ever REALLY say if I didn’t KNOW the end was near. So what do I do with the fact that Emily had no warning? We all looked up forty-eight hours after her death and were struck that, while she had been just as surprised as we were, she HAD said goodbye. In the week before she died, she had left us notes, messages, emails, sharing her heart with us, her beliefs, the things that MATTERED to her—sharing that WE mattered to her. One of the girls told me that Emily’s final words to her had been, “I’m praying for you” at the end of a conversation they had had the morning of the day she died. God was helping her set her affairs in order even though she didn’t know she was running out of time. Two years ago when my brother was in and out of emergency rooms and intensive care unit, my dad moved out, battles over custody and finances were waged, we moved from the home where I’d been raised, and my mom and I ended up in separate appartments—back then I had HATED the phrase, “Live every day as though it were your last.” The only way I could drag myself out of bed every morning to sit numbly on the floor of my room and stare off into space for hours on end was to KNOW that there would be a tomorrow, and after that another tomorrow, and after that another, each one carrying me further and further from the depression and pain that was eating me alive. The only way I could survive the present was to look to and have faith in the future. Now . . . I recognize that there is a season for everything, and that sentiment that is so irritated me then really does speak to me now. I find myself looking at the things that demand my time and asking, “If I died tomorrow, where would I wish I had poured out my time?” When I am stressed at work over getting someone’s order wrong or forgetting their alll-important extra olives, I stop and think, “If I have thirty minutes to live and simply don’t know it, would I have wanted to squander my emotional energy in this way?” As I got home from work every day during Succoth (one of my favorite holidays on the Jewish calandar), I would briefly consider my options for the evening, each time an evening of funny stories, deep talks, dancing, and games in which everyone I loved laughed at my expense—Succoth always won; I started to stop even asking the question.

Inicially, when Succoth came upon the heals of Emily’s loss, I complained inwardly. Not that I wasn’t excited to see all the aunts and uncles and friends that were traveling here for the holiday, but that it is the holiday, ironically, in which we are Instructed to lay aside the things that weigh us down and rejoice in God’s care of us. I look at it now . . . God has such a sense of timing. I needed to be close to my family. I needed to be with the people with whom I can be every version of myself at once. That first night of Succoth I sat for three hours and talked to Uncle Bob about Emily. He had read my note on facebook Emily Happened, as had a couple of the other aunts and one of the cousins. We talked about life, about God, about grief, about hitting rock bottom and picking yourself back up again. A few nights later I sat down with one of the cousins, Jessie, and we had a real talk about something I had wanted to ask her for some time, but hadn’t known how to. A few nights later, I struck up a conversation with her brother, asking him about what he was doing, where he hoped he was headed, and the reasons behind things that mattered to him. As I looked into each of these people’s eyes, asked them questions, and really LISTENED to what they had to say, I realized that THIS is how you say goodbye . . . it looks a lot like saying hello. As I pulled out of the driveway each night and started the hour drive home, I felt content. If I had hit any of those deer that ran infront of me on the way home every night and never got the chance to talk to any of my family again . . . I would have done precisely what I wanted—each night I tried to make a concious effort to say, “you matter to me” in a way that would last if I didn’t get the chance to say it again.

I read over everything that I have written above and laugh a little—“Man, she sounds like she’s really put together. I wonder what her secret is.” Yeah . . . not so much. Okay . . . I have decided; I miss my old self. This new one is confusing. I feel like my mind is stuck on the scene from Fiddler on the Roof where Teviah validates two or three diametrically opposed statements. I feel at peace and acceptance with what happened, with Emily’s death, with her murder—yet I am angry with some cosmic sense of unjustice. I slam doors from time to time. I pound my steering wheel as I drive, “God, why?” I feel so mellowed out, so much more patient with the world and myself. Things that once felt so critical loose their weight. Yet in many moments I feel so easily angered by the people around me and their trivial complaints. The nuttiest thing about it all is that I can, and often DO, feel every one of these conflicting feelings at the same time with equal intensity. I sat on the porch swing of my childhood home late Saturday night with a friend, “I feel like the deepest, deepest place in me is at peace, but everything else . . . all that is an overwhelming current of confusion that keeps knocking me off my feet.” If my mind was short circeting at the moment I learned of Emily’s death, now it just feels like it’s running a search of all my computer files . . . ALL of them. No particular search, just so much information and feelings filtering through at breakneck speed that sometimes I cannot tell if I’m really processing anything or just standing back and watching the stampede flood over me. As Josh said in Timeline of their nifty little machine, I can say of this ordeal: “It strips you down to a mulucular level.”

There is a daily struggle to know what to do with all of my feelings. How to hold on and at the same time let go. I cried to Grace again this week. “I’m afraid we are forgetting her,” I said. She said she didn’t think that was possible, even if we talked about it less. “Do you really think any of us will be able to hear the name Emily ever again and not think of her?” she asked me. She was right. I find that name everywhere now. One of the other girls told me that first week that she found herself cumbulsively writing Emily’s name all over her hands. She didn’t know why. A few of the girls went out and bought a piece of clothing that reminded them of something Emily had worn and loved. I stopped wearing mascara the day she died out of necessity. I could probably go back to it now—most of the others did two weeks ago at least—but I didn’t want to. I didn’t quite understand why, though I was starting to guess at the reason. When I went out for Succoth and saw all the tzit tzit, tassles with blue threads, hanging out from under the men’s untucked shirts, I understood a little more fully this response to our loss, and I understood the reasons behind the tzit tzit that served as a constant reminder of God’s Word. I understood the desire to be marked just as God had Instructed the Israelites to mark themselves with their clothing, their food, and even their own bodies—this wish to have something on the outside that spoke of the change that had taken place on the inside. One of my favorite quotes, an African proverb, came back to me with more meaning than I had ever found in it before: “As I go from this place, I am wearing you.”

I find kinship to characters in stories I have known for years. Corrie Ten Boom’s admission, as she watched her family die at the hands of the Nazi occupation, that Scripture suddenly took on an epic feel . . . I have “known” this woman since early highschool, but not as I do now. I find that a single passage of Scripture can capture my complete attention for days on end. Last Saturday as I drove out to Succoth, making a mental note of the time signifying the exact time of Emily’s death three weeks before, I slammed the palm of my hand against the steering wheel, “God, why? I don’t understand.” The thought had been following me all day. She SHOULD be here! Why did a fourteen year old girl that would listen to anything you needed to say, who loved to laugh, loved God, and would do ANYTHING for you . . . why did SHE die? Why does a man who could so easily take her life for no reason as she walked home in the middle of the afternoon . . . how could he go free? As I pounded my steering wheel and demanded an answer I didn’t expect to get, I suddenly heard a Voice I have come to recognize: “Will you have Barabus or Jesus?” I was stopped in my tracks. As my foot lay heavily on the gas and the yellow lines whizzed by down the center of the road, I recognized an answer I had not anticipated, and for a long moment my spirit was quiet. Why had Jesus, a man who listened, who laughed, who loved God, who would do ANYTHING for you . . . why was he murdered? Why was he taken when a murderer walked free? I could answer with something about the reason behind Jesus’ death, the purpose in it, the plan from the beginning of time, but really . . . our very sense of justice MUST be taken aback by it just as literally THOUSANDS have been struck by the unfairness of Emily’s murder. Just as Corrie Ten Boom wrestled with the same sense of injustice, she and I both were and are struck by the overwhelming REALITY of the gospel.

These are the parts of this new Abi I am grateful to be as much as it hurts sometimes to walk in her smudged yellow sneakers. Henry Adams once said, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” Emily was not a recognized teacher by any means. She was really more of a student than anything else. But she has taught us so much by befriending us and letting us see her life and work through her death. Each of us that knew and loved her are changed. I can feel a depth in my soul that was not there before. I was talking to one of Emily’s other friends a couple of weeks ago, and we both agreed it is harder for those that are left behind, and yet Gwyndolyn from George Elliot’s classic Daniel Deronda really said it best, “Do not think of me sadly—I am better for having known you.”

Yet after all of this, all of this writing, processing, thinking . . . I don’t know how to go on. I don’t even know if I want to. There is a grief in realizing that the grief is not as strong as it once was. It is the grief of my heart beginning to heal, beginning to step out of the deep, dark hole I had fallen into. And yet I realize it will be a long climb and the shadow of that darkness will remain on my heart along with the scar where Emily touched me and where it bled when she was taken away. There is a constant struggle both externally and internally over the insistance that I have to go on. Coworkers that don’t know what to do with my changed, more quiet and serious persona tell me I have to go on, let it go . . . I am irritated, insisting that it is a long process that I can’t just rush through, and yet I find myself arguing against an internal voice telling me the same thing that they are saying out loud. I have been determined throughout the last month to FEEL it—all of it. I tell myself that I get to decide if Emily’s death was in vain. Yet as I focus on on MY choice, what I have decided to do with this loss, how I have made the decision to carry her with me, I also realize I’m not in nearly as much power over this as I sometimes like to believe. Just as passages from Emily’s favorite Book keep sifting into my mind at random, quotes from other stories she loved keep coming to mind, shedding light and wisdom into feelings I cannot put words to on my own. One of Emily’s other friends quoted Frodo, the unlikely hero from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings that suffered the loss of friends, health, and innocence, in an effort to express her own sense of personal loss, “How do you pick up the pieces of an old life? You go through the actions, but in your heart you begin to understand; there is no going back.”

I am more alive than I was before, but it is because a friend of mine is now dead. I am grateful for the perspective she gave me, and just as grateful to know that Jesus too was a man “of sorrows and aquainted with grief.” I used to feel so depressed whenever I read that passage, but now I feel comforted. Nothing Emily suffered is unknown to Him . . . . and nothing I suffer now is beyond His intimate understanding. We sang a song every Shabbat during Succoth, “I was a young man, and I grew old, but I have never seen a righteous man forsaken.” Psalms reminds me that, “as I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil for You are with me.” Jesus promised to “never leave me nor forsake me.” I always thought it was harder to be left behind as my siblings went off on trips to the West coast and the East coast, down to he Gulf and clear up north where it actually snows. I was always left behind while they went off on the adventures. I am left behind again as someone I love goes off further than ever before, but as Stephen Curtis Chapman wrote, “I have been invited as a son. I’ve been invited to come . . . “ I am left behind, but the adventure is spread out before me—the adventure of tommorow. Four weeks ago from tomorrow at 5:45 p.m. my time, the examiners pronounced what Emily had already known for nearly a quarter of an hour—she had gone on ahead of us. Tomorrow starts the weekly rite of counting down the time to 5:30 p.m., counting down the time that Emily had left on another Saturday. “Three hours, two hours, one . . . “ I tell myself, dramatically struck by the realization that she didn’t know any more then than I know now of what is to come. My hour IS my adventure. I may have one hour. I may have one hundred billion. But that not knowing, the every day courage of dancing backwards and following His lead, living every day as though it were my last--that is my journey. As Chinese wisdom tells us, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I will take the step. I will live each day she does not have. I will honor the scar she has left on my heart, and the Scars that made my Hope possible, knowing in all certainty that I will see her on the Other Side. So as I mark this moment, this collection of twenty-seven days, I take the first step into the next. With every greeting I am saying goodbye. I miss my old self, as I willingly take on who I am now. As I go from here, I know I am better for having known her. I thank Him for the twenty-seven days He has given me. I ask him for the twenty-eighth, and I look forward to the day in which death too shall die.