Luxury!!!

My own bed! My own bathroom! And Rachel is home!!! She won’t be dancing in the streets any time soon, but she’s in her own bed, too. Miraculous! Riches! No more waking up every two hours so that people can ask you what your name is and what year Columbus voted for Ronald Reagan. No more beeping. No more punching tiny holes in people. Vampires be gone!!

I have heard people say a million times (don’t you love folksy moral aphorisms?) that you’d always choose your own trials over somebody else’s? Yeah. Well, I’ve never really gotten it. But I’ll tell you my epiphany after this last unbelievable week: after having been to the door of death (and Rachel was NOT close to dying – but if it had been seventy years ago, yes) and all the rest, I know why living through your own traumas is more doable than thinking about living through somebody else’s (assuming that Rachel’s trauma was also, in some part, my own):

In your own trial, there is so much at stake. People you love and need to keep. Things you would hurt to lose. Love, eyes, walking, friendship, the power to bless those you love – and whose need for you you are very aware of. These are things you live with intimately – you dress in them in the morning when you rise, you cultivate and weed and tame and train them all day long, and you lie down praying for them. So you have a lot to fight for. And that gives you the power to do what must be done – to walk straight up to the scary things, the painful things, the frightening things—narrowing your eyes and rolling up your sleeves. You are invested. And it makes you fierce enough to reusire – a French word that means some fusion of winning and accomplishing and triumphing.

Other people’s trials look worse because you have no sense of personal loss on the other side of them, no thing that plugs you in and forces you to fight.

And Geneva’s epiphany: if you think you love someone, try walking them through hell as caretaker. Then you know. Then you really know.

But as in all things, with the relief comes loss:

How often do you get to be with a beloved one, all alone, no distractions, no business pressing – nothing that takes you off on your parallel lives? When was my last sleep-over with the girls? When do you get to demonstrate with your whole soul your gratitude to someone who has been one of the stakes of your tent? That last evening was the sweetest thing – talking quietly about everything. Being two people in one life for a moment together. And then Lorna, the Super Nurse, came in and it was three girls at a gabfest, way into the night, way later than we should have been up. It was great. And that, I will miss.