A TERRIBLE-BEAUTIFUL ADVENTURE

I Leave You Joy
A Companion to Twice Widowed

After You Read

You have just read I Leave You Joy. I wish I could tell you that what I found in Hawaii held steadily from there. It didn't.

I came home with a growing sense of belonging in the world. I was writing again. I was energized, content, and even having fun. Some of Darrell's belongings that I once couldn't imagine parting with were beginning to get in my way. Then things went terribly wrong one more time.

I was targeted in an investment scam by someone I believed I could trust. The financial consequences were real, but what happened inside me frightened me more. The dissociation returned. So did the fear. I hid in my room. I wondered how I could possibly finish a book about suffering and becoming when I seemed to have fallen so far from everything I thought I had learned.

At one point, with more than a little exasperated humor, I decided perhaps the last chapter should simply say:

NEVER MIND.

The Light Had Still Been Real

There was a trap in the way I was thinking. If I could fall this far again, perhaps the peace I had experienced wasn't real. Perhaps the hope wasn't real. Perhaps whatever I thought I had learned had been an illusion. But it had been real. So was this.

Grief - and life - didn't move according to the story I wanted to tell about them. I could experience genuine peace and later become terrified again. I could reconnect with myself and later feel disconnected. I could discover something true and still encounter a reality I didn't know how to hold. One did not make the other untrue.

That is one of the things I understand differently now. A terrible experience does not reach backward and erase the light that came before it. And light does not reach backward and make the terrible less terrible. Both can remain true.

Meeting the Fallible Lorrie

This time something was different. So much of what I had endured before had happened to me. Darrell's cancer. His death. Dad's decline and death. The loss of funding. The pandemic. Circumstances had repeatedly demanded things from me that I had not chosen. I had sometimes resented even being made responsible for my attitude toward what was happening to me - as though suffering itself were not enough and I now had to turn it into something admirable.

The scam reached somewhere different. I had trusted someone I shouldn't have trusted. No matter how many people reminded me that I had been deliberately deceived, I could not escape the question underneath my fear: What if I had made a terrible mistake?

I knew myself as intelligent, strong, willing to take risks, and able to solve difficult problems. And now I was meeting someone I had much less experience holding.

The fallible Lorrie.

Of course I had always been fallible. Suffering didn't make me human. But much of my life had allowed me to live without encountering that part of my humanity quite so completely. Now she was standing in front of me. And I didn't know how to let her belong.

The Hardest Even-If

I had asked myself Even-If questions before: Even if my son remained injured. Even if my husbands died. Even if funding disappeared. But this Even-If reached somewhere more frightening: Even if I had ruined everything myself?

I lay in my room turning that question over until finally I shouted, "I don't know!" And for once, I don't know was not a failure of the practice. It was the truth.

Even-If could not guarantee that everything would be all right. It could not make the consequences disappear. It could not turn uncertainty into certainty or give me control over what came next. It could only keep the thing I feared from becoming the whole story before the story had finished happening.

The Terrible Does Not Become Beautiful

There is something I want to say differently now than I said it when I wrote the memoir. I don't believe terrible things happened in order to teach me something. Something terrible can give us the opportunity to discover something without having happened in order for us to discover it. That distinction matters to me. Some things simply suck. They were terrible when they happened, and what I learned from them does not reach backward and make them less terrible.

Suffering did place me in circumstances I would never willingly have entered. In those circumstances, I encountered parts of myself that an abundant life had not required me to meet so completely: fear, weakness, resentment, helplessness, fallibility, and the desire to control what could not be controlled. I came to know more of myself there. But that does not mean suffering was necessary so I could know myself. It means that, once I was there, I was capable of discovering something within it.

The terrible remained terrible. And there was beauty too. Not therefore. And.

Perhaps that is what I had been trying to name all along when I called this a terrible-beautiful adventure.

Mercy

At my lowest point, I began remembering the people and moments that had brought light into my life. Many had names - family, friends, doctors, authors, strangers, people who had shown me kindness when I needed it. And then, while walking my dog beside a lake, another light came into view. Its name was Mercy.

I don't know how to make that experience into an argument, and I don't want to. Mercy was how I understood what happened to me. I had spent months believing that if I had made a terrible mistake, I might have forfeited something essential about myself. Mercy made room for the fallible Lorrie without requiring me to pretend the mistake hadn't happened or that its consequences weren't real.

Nothing outside me had been fixed. The money hadn't been restored. The people responsible hadn't been found. No circumstance arrived to prove that I had worried for nothing. The circumstances did not have to change before I could meet myself differently inside them. The fallible Lorrie belonged too. And somewhere in that encounter, I could say something I had not expected: I fell in love with my humanity all over again.

Not the exemplary parts. My humanity.

What I Found

This is where I want to be especially careful. I don't want my story to become another demand placed upon yours. The widow is not responsible for redeeming what happened to her. She does not owe the loss growth, gratitude, meaning, wisdom, transformation, or a beautiful ending. I found things inside my suffering. That does not mean you are required to find them inside yours. What happened to me does not establish what must happen to you.

My story is testimony, not template.

And even in my own story, what I discovered did not finish me. I can know something deeply and still be surprised by myself tomorrow. I can encounter courage and fear, confidence and fallibility, grief and joy. Wholeness, as I understand it now, isn't the elimination of those contradictions. It is room for more of what is true.

There Is More

Maybe that is why I keep returning to the word more. My capacity did expand. I discovered that I could hold realities together that I once thought would cancel each other out. I encountered parts of myself I hadn't known before, and other parts became more fully available to me. In some ways, I became more authentically myself.

But capacity is not always large. A thimble filled to the brim is at full capacity. Sometimes what I can hold is very small, and still, it is all of me. That is why dappling light mattered to me. A small patch of light did not have to become brighter or larger to be sufficient. Its smallness did not diminish its sufficiency.

More does not mean there is a finished version of me waiting at the end of enough suffering. It means there may always be more to encounter: more of ourselves, more of other people, more of reality, more mystery, more love, more life than we can see from where we are standing now. And sometimes there may be nothing more we can see at all. That does not make the possibility disappear. There is more is not a promise about specifics, but it leaves the future open to live beyond the ordinary.

I Leave You Joy

At the end of Darrell's life, he gathered us around him and told us what he most wanted to leave behind: "I leave you joy." I spent a long time learning what those words could mean in a life that continued to contain suffering. Joy did not protect me from what came next. It did not prevent me from becoming lost again. It did not make the terrible beautiful. But neither could the terrible make the beauty untrue.

Perhaps that is enough for me to say now. Darrell left me joy. Life left me uncertainty. Suffering introduced me to parts of myself I had not known how to hold. Mercy made room for them. And I am still here. Not finished. Still curious. Still capable of being surprised by my own life.

There is more.

I don't know what yours will be. And I won't finish the imagining for you.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

Is there a fear about yourself that has been trying to become the whole story?

Even if ________________________________________________?

You do not have to answer it.