all shall be well

... and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well

The time stamp passed quietly this year, almost undetected. Last year, I’d needed to hold vigil in the final week of February; I noticed everything, felt everything, took a day off work to lay on the couch and remind myself I was alive. The first anniversary felt like a test, like an experiment to see if matter would hold or if, on just the right square of the calendar, the bottom might still fall out after all.

It didn’t. I lived to see March. Again.

This year was different. In January and early February I began waiting for it, anticipating the requisite steps for self care I would need and unintentionally taking up a newfound habit of mumbling things like “it’s okay, baby girl” to myself randomly in the kitchen or on the stairs. But when the actual anniversary of my 2023 hospitalization came, I missed it. Just like that.

I disliked that I’d forgotten, disappointed to have missed the opportunity to honor, to remember, my visit to the veil. But I know a bit about the brain’s line of defense, enough to thank mine for sparing me of emotions that I must not have had the capacity to hold this time. Only later did I realize that was the week I’d experienced acute stomach cramps, gas, and bloating. The brain might protect us from revisiting trauma, but it can’t stop the body from telling the truth.

If you’ve read The Mystics Would Like a Word, you know that I wrote about this near-death experience in the last chapter (the only one in the book I had left to write when I was admitted to the ICU, and it just so happened to be on horror, death, and gore). As I thought about how to acknowledge the passing of this year’s anniversary, sharing the excerpt below felt like a good way to do it. If you haven’t read the backstory to all this, you can find it here. And, of course, if you want even more you can always buy the book. ((wink))

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Two days after the emergency appendectomy, it was determined that I needed to have an MRI of my digestive system. I was still in excruciating pain, heavily medicated, and weaker than I’d been in all my life, including childbirth. Being transferred to and from the MRI took several hours—I was that slow—but it had to be done. In those ICU days, nearly every time I closed my eyes to rest or fall asleep, I was inundated with an onslaught of images, videos, voices, and thoughts, like someone was shuffling cards containing everything in my brain, over and over and over again, as it tried to make sense of the trauma.

So when it happened again there on the MRI table, with the loud whooshing sound of mechanical magic thrumming against my ears, I gave way to its familiar visitation and watched as a passive observer. But these were not the glimpses I had grown accustomed to: not my boys laughing, not my daughter reaching for me, not my father-in-law saying, “We have to trust God,” in his simple, steadfast way; these were imagined scenes that had never happened but could have and, somehow, did.

But no, this time it was like watching B-roll from a horror movie. It was centipedes and cockroaches, spiders and snakes, scorpions crawling over skeletons, and gigantic worms coming out of human orifices. It was the worst of the worst of my mind’s shadow, and I lay there peacefully—reverently, even—and watched it all unfold. And that’s when I heard the voice.

Nothing is scary.

I didn’t know whose voice it was: mine? God’s? That of some other celestial being? Some combination of all of those things? But it didn’t matter; I wasn’t wondering that at all. I was mesmerized by the truth of the statement. Nothing is scary.

I knew, without having to consciously think it, that feeling scared was okay. Feeling scared was human, and being human was good. I did feel scared of what had happened, was happening, and might yet happen to my body, to my life. But as I faced the darkness of the unknown and stared into an uncertainty I had never imagined for myself, the words made sense to me. The universe was a benevolent place; its creator a Thing of love. The worst of the worst was here—who knew, perhaps the end was here—and everything was good. Everything held. Nothing was scary.