Nothing But the Truth

I've always felt, for some reason, ever since I was a child, a pressure to answer any question that was put to me, as accurately, truthfully, and correctly as possible. Unfortunately, sometimes accuracy, truth, and "correctness" have been in conflict with each other. When that happens, I have never known what to do. My seventh-grade science teacher said to me, with a pained sigh, "Lisa. Just go back to your desk, and mark. true. or. false." 

I am caught between all my felt obligations--to give the questioner the answer they are looking for (correctness), the actual facts of the situation (accuracy), and the real heart of the matter (truth). I try hard--often too hard--to reconcile all three, to package the truth together with the facts and make it fit in the correct box. But sometimes there just doesn't seem to be any box that will hold the answer that is true.

Nowhere have I felt this more keenly over recent years than when it comes to my divorce.

When bad things happen, it's only natural that people have a lot of questions. Painful things are hard. They are scary, and not just for the person they have happened to. We are afraid, and we need answers. Sometimes, we look for the answers that will comfort us in doctrine, research, or teaching. Sometimes we simply find them in our own opinions. Sometimes we look to the person who has been most affected, to tell their story, to supply the facts. Knowing the answers lets us feel like we can make sense of it all, like we have it figured out--even that we can protect ourselves from suffering the same outcome.

The questions I've experienced surrounding my divorce have come from all of these places. They've sometimes been asked as questions, and sometimes been expressed as certainties, but even when they are made as pronouncements of fact, there is still a query behind them that is directed with expectation at me. Which answer box does my situation fit in?

Was the divorce my fault? Was it his fault? Which one of us divorced the other? Was it because of an affair? Maybe even one of those dreaded "emotional affairs" we are so fond of warning about? Was it because we thought we could just give up when the going got tough--because we didn't remove "divorce" from our vocabulary? FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DID WE LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON OUR ANGER??

"Teacher, was it this man who sinned, or his parents, that he was born blind?" 

We know these are the possible correct answers. Please choose one. We are waiting.

The problem is, I am being asked a question that I can't answer. Not because I don't know the answer. No. I know. In fact, I am the expert. I know every detail, every moment, every memory and scar. I can't answer because it's an impossible question, it's a trick question. No one could answer it.

I didn't get divorced because I wasn't open to reconciliation, or because I didn't pray the Scriptures for my husband, or because it was never a true Christian marriage to begin with. (All of which, in case you are wondering, have actually been said to me.) I didn't get divorced because I knew someone else who got divorced, even though statistics show that people are much more likely to get divorced if they know someone who has, because seeing others who just give up when things get difficult can make you think it's an easy option to give up too. (Yes, also said to me.) I wasn't just unhappy with my husband and decided to get rid of him--in doing so, by the way, making a friend who is currently struggling in marriage think that maybe she can do the same. (Yep. This one too. Not by the friend, of course.)

I know this isn't what people want to hear, but the truth at the heart of my divorce will not fit into any of these preconceived theological certainties. You won't find the answer to it in any article with five easy tips for keeping your marriage happy, or five terrible mistakes to avoid. No marriage class or seminar would have fixed it. Please understand, if any of these things have been valuable to you or are relevant to your experience, I am not dismissing that. I am speaking only of my own situation. The sweeping generalities are part of the problem. But my story, my counselor tells me, only I will truly know, and that will have to be enough, both for you and for me.

So people. Christians. Friends and acquaintances, brothers and sisters, family. We have come from the same place, you and I; we've walked the same, familiar spiritual path, and I understand. I know that not one of you means me any harm. I'm sure that most of you, if you are aware of having had these questions for me at all, stopped asking them long ago, and do not even realize that I am still struggling to answer them, every time I hear you talk about marriage, divorce, and relationships. I'm just learning, myself, how much I still feel the pressure to answer correctly, in a way that will satisfy you, and I know that much of that pressure is coming from no one but myself. I do love you, and I believe we have a responsibility to each other.  I believe we are accountable to each other. I do. Nevertheless, I am finally coming to know, probably too late in life, that sometimes the problem is not with the answer. Sometimes it is with the question. And I have reached a point where the effort of trying to make the truth fit into one of the boxes is tying me in knots. It is hindering my forward motion. There's a problem with the question, and it's time I stopped trying to answer it. It's time, as my counselor says, for me to learn to honor my narrative, not to defend it. It's time to tell myself, and everyone else, the truth. The truth is, it's a bullshit question. It's as simple as that.

Diagnosis Day

As the parent of teenagers, I'm accustomed to having my kids think that the majority of what I do is weird. Most of the time, I figure this is just biology doing its job, but sometimes I have to admit that they might have a point.

A couple of weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my son, and I started talking about an idea I had to mark this year's Diagnosis Day, my annual commemoration of the day cancer became a part of my life. "Mom," he said, "no offense, but Diagnosis Day seems kind of weird. I mean, I could see if you were going to celebrate, like, when it was over or something. But diagnosis seems like a bad thing. Why would you want to celebrate that?"

I think this is actually an understandable question. So, instead of the day I got cancer, why not celebrate the day I beat cancer?

One reason is that there really is no such day. In my own case, I was officially "cancer-free" as soon as my surgery was completed, but I had in front of me another 18 months of multiple types of chemotherapy, radiation, and several years of drug therapy that is still actually ongoing. There was no time in that round of bruising, scarring, body- and soul-battering struggle for survival that seemed the appropriate moment for celebration.

Not only that, but I believe in every case, not just mine, even once treatment is over, even once someone has uttered the magical words like "remission" or "cancer-free", only if you have not had cancer can you believe that there is ever, ever a moment when it is completely and conclusively behind you. Just last week, I had a volunteer in my office at work, telling me about his relief that his oncology appointment that morning had gone well. He said, "I mean, I already know I'm in remission and everything, so I know it was fine, but...you know." I said, "It's always there." We nodded, knowing.

Newly diagnosed, I had a veteran say to me once, "It just walks right in and pulls up a seat, doesn't it?" And that is still the best description I have ever heard. Cancer pulls up a seat at the table of your life, sits down like a family member, makes itself at home. It moves in and out of your spaces, occupies your thoughts, becomes your closest companion, at least for a while. Although the chair may sometimes be empty, it remains, always a reminder of its absent occupant. Diagnosis is the beginning of a lifetime relationship, in a way you can't realize until it has begun. It reminds me of the way some friends of mine, years ago before any of us were parents, after winning a long battle with infertility, around the beginning of the second trimester of their much-longed-for pregnancy, asked their OB, "So, when can we stop worrying?" (Parents of adult children, I can hear you laughing.) Once you've become a part of each other, there will never again be a time when the thought, the worry, the awareness, will be absent in your thoughts, even when you are no longer united in body.

But there is a reason for marking Diagnosis Day that is about more than just having no clear end-point to commemorate. While my son is right that a cancer diagnosis seems like a bad thing--and I won't argue that it is a positive experience that everyone should have--those of us who have sat in its company know that it brings along with it other, more welcome guests. The lessons, people, and events that accompany it will change your life in ways that are painful, beautiful, and unexpected. You will grow in ways you didn't know you needed to grow. You will learn something important about the people and relationships in your life, even if those lessons are difficult. Things will be revealed, refined, clarified. Whatever else happens, you will never be the same again.

When I had just received my diagnosis, on the long, exhausting day I met my whole medical team for the first time, I stopped on the way home for Chinese food and caffeine. Too tired and overwhelmed to be hungry, I picked at my food; finally, before leaving, I opened the fortune cookie to the tiny slip of paper that read, "You will have much to be thankful for in the coming year." I put my head in my hands, there at the table among the sauce packets and chopstick wrappers, and sobbed outright with relief and gratitude. The words that penetrated my numb, shocked heart and mind that day are still on my refrigerator where I see them daily, and they are as true now as they were then. That year, and every year since then, has been a gift--a bittersweet gift that cannot be explained, and that I would not trade for anything either more or less, even though it is not a gift I chose. And that, every year, seems like a thing worth celebrating.

Happy Diagnosis Day.

After

"Whenever you take a step forward, you are bound to disturb something.

 You disturb the air as you go forward, you disturb the dust, the ground."

~Indira Ghandi

One of my favorite artists, Carrie Newcomer, has a song titled "Before and After". In it, she describes the way that trauma and tragedy strikes us--"The dust settles after a hit and run, bewildered by the damage done". The metaphor always catches me, with its sense of shock, bewilderment, confusion, and, if you have had a moment like this, that unique sensation of time coming to halt. Everything stopping. An end to the world as you know it. It seems as if nothing will ever be the same again.

And, in fact, it won't be. It will never be the same.

This is the first, maybe the hardest piece of learning--that it cannot ever be the same again. As Carrie says, our lives from that moment onward can be framed in terms of "before" and "after". These moments, seasons, experiences, are the watershed moments of life. They change us. They change everything.

Sometimes, it seems as though it takes everything in us just to get from before to after. We put our energy into surviving. We are not sure if we will make it. We keep on, maybe only because others are depending on us and quitting is not an option. We get up another day. Others move around us as if in a dream, as if life continues as always. We keep getting up again, another day and then another. And eventually, to our great surprise, we are through. Everything is not made better, things are not fixed, our loss has not been returned to us. But there is life on the other side of our pain. The question is now, what shall we do with it?

Everything has changed, and we are faced with choices. What does our path forward look like in the new world that has been created? One thing is clear--we can't remain the same. We can try, of course, and some do. But the space that used to hold us has shifted, and any attempt to go on living in the "before" will simply be a painful reminder that "before" is gone forever. As the circumstances of our lives change, our choices and responses must adapt to things as they are, not as they once were. 

Seeing things through new eyes, making new choices, is hard too. Now, not only must we realize that things will never be the same again, but we must learn to want something new. We must do battle with the lie that wanting something good for ourselves in the present is a betrayal of the past; we must tell ourselves the truth, in spite of what our deceitful hearts whisper--that the past is no longer here, and that it no longer requires our devotion. We must know that our love for what was torn away from us in the past is not diminished by our ability to find new life, new love, as our wounds heal and we begin to live in "after".

What happens to "before" then, once we are walking the path of "after"? Immediately after my divorce, someone close to me said, "Now it's time to take some time to heal before moving forward." How nice that would be.  :)  Unfortunately, the healing can only happen by this constant motion forward. Just sitting still or rolling up in a ball, thinking, "Now I'm going to get all healed up before I do anything else," while it sounds very appealing, is not moving away from "before" and toward "after". Healing is a process more like walking across a live minefield. We will only know what's out there when we come across it. "Before" does not disappear. It will never go away, nor should it.

What this means is that the dividing line between before and after is not a clear and bright one. They are inextricably intertwined with each other. Healing from the tragedy and trauma of the past can only be accomplished by moving steadily forward toward the future; the path to the future will always wind through the memories, losses, and fears that are the landmarks of the past. 

So if, like me, you're moving on today, know that moving into our "after" is not a betrayal or an abandonment of our "before".  We can move forward with no harm to what was worth keeping. And if, as we go, we sometimes encounter the pain and loss as well, we can't be discouraged. The dust that has settled in the wake of the impact will inevitably be stirred up again as we survivors struggle to our feet and begin to move away. But never fear--we are on the right path.