Spring Resilience

Sometimes people die when you expect them to.
Sometimes people die when you don't.
Sometimes people go through things where they should have died, but somehow, they walked away.
And sometimes these three things happen to people you know in the span of the same week.

My friend Pk died on Friday, May 2. I journeyed with her for the last four and a half months of her life, as a companion and friend and also as her "frontal lobe"/end-of-life coordinator. I coordinated overnight companionship and food drops and bodywork and rides and fresh juice pickups when that was the last thing she could still tolerate to eat. I coordinated 24/7 hands-on caregiving for the last 8 days of her life. I watched cancer slowly take over her body, knowing that as a cancer survivor myself, this reality could be my own one day. I gave time and energy and sweat and tears, but I also gave a lot of love. And I gained a lot of love. It was one of the most beautiful and most challenging things I've ever done. I was stretched beyond old limits, and I grew to find that somehow, there was capacity beyond those limits. It was exhausting and life-giving and filled with reciprocity, and it will take months to fully find the words I know I will write one day about it all.

Then, we found out my partner's 32-year-old classmate from grad school, was walking down the street on a normal Thursday, the day before Pk died, minding his own business. And then he got hit by a car. The driver bolted. Aaron died on the scene. Gone.

Then, 3 days after I drove Pk to her green burial site and covered her body with six feet of flowers and earth, I watched my partner get in a horrible mountain biking accident. He flew over the handle bars, landed on his head, cracked his helmet in pieces, tumbled down a hill, fractured his neck, his back, his rib, his left wrist, and his right elbow, had a lung partially collapse, and got covered in bloody scrapes and bruises, and yet, he walked away from the scene when he could easily have been dead or paralyzed.

And in the middle of all of that, I watched my best friend get married to the love of her life on one the most enjoyable days I've had in a long time.

And in the middle of that, I danced and twirled and embraced and pulsed in deep connection with dear friends until 4am multiple nights in a row amidst a beautiful dance retreat.

And in the middle of all of that, I checked updates to see if my other best friend had gone into labor yet to birth my third godchild.

Because grief never happens in isolation. It joins the dance of joy and swirls in the songs of celebration. Everything really does happen everywhere all at once. People marry while others divorce. People die while others are born. People grieve while others celebrate. People sit in neck braces while others dance. And we are all here experiencing the overwhelming bliss and mess of it all, jumbled up together in this wild ride of being human.

After maneuvering someone with fresh spinal fractures through two flights and two airports, Peter and I got back to North Carolina. My body had carried so much the past week, and I knew I needed to make space to start to move through the emotional processing lag that comes from everything happening all at once.

I left Peter at home with his fractures braced, and I got back on my bike and went for a ride, because what else do you do after a week like this but get back in the saddle and try to find life in it all?

And instead of taking the normal out and back route I ride during the week, I decided to take the loop through town. I needed to go visit the Pigeon River. I thought, "She knows what it feels like to swell so big with the weight of the storm that it might break her and everything around her. She knows about loss. She knows about grief.

But she also knows about resilience.

So I left my house and biked the hilly route toward town, slower than I'm used to because my body is still recovering from surgery I had 3 months ago. I passed the pasture where the farmer keeps a giant smiley face mowed into the side of the hill year-round, and I paused to remember that we don't choose the darkness that we are given, but we can always choose to add more light.

I eventually reached downtown and continued past businesses that are still walled up after getting flooded in Helene almost 8 months ago. I biked past parking lots filled with debris, past houses still wrapped in power lines right off the main drag, past my favorite brewery in town that might not open again after getting flooded out by two catastrophic storms in the span of 3 years.

But I also passed by Riverview Garden Store, where the same family that's been running it for years built their shop back up for the second time after getting flooded, where I bought fresh vegetable seedlings a couple weeks ago that will feed me this summer.

Resilience.

I also biked passed lavender blooming in the community garden that was 15-feet underwater in the October flood.

Resilience.

Instead of staying on the road like I normally do in my route through town, I wanted to take the bike path along the river. I needed to be close to her. I needed to go visit a specific spot on her banks, one I know well.

On my way, I biked past the fence next to the middle school football stadium, still lined with leaves and debris all the way up their 10-foot height -- another remaining scar from Helene. Next to it sits a brand new, fixed baseball field that has bleachers strung about it, unrecognizable 8 months ago.

Resilience.

I went further. I heard two middle schoolers splashing and squealing down the bank, resting into one of their first swims of the spring in the arms of a river that caused death and destruction in their lives before they had the language to talk about grief.

Resilience.

Forgiveness.

And then a little further down the path, I got to a left turn that goes down to the river's edge. I walked my bike down to the water. I sat down on the ground, and I wept. I wept for it all. The grief and the loss. And also the resilience and joy woven into it.

I also wept for me. This season has been too much. I am burned out and worn down. Heavy. But I know that the most guaranteed thing about life is change, and things will not feel like this forever. No matter how high the waters rise, they always recede, and the familiarity of the calm flow will come again between the storms.

It was in this spot that I wept 3 years ago after I found out that my CT scan was clear, and that the weird symptoms I'd been experiencing in remission did not mean that my cancer had come back. I was still cancer-free. And now, I sat in this same spot, 4 years after I started chemo that horrible and beautiful spring. I am still cancer-free. And though I am still healing from surgery in January, I am back in the saddle, despite it all.

Resilience.

Sometimes life actually is too much. And it's not about us being tested. And that whole Christian thing about God not giving us more than we can handle? I call bullshit. Sometimes it is too much. Sometimes the weight of the storm is more than we can keep within our banks, and we break.

But the beautiful thing about the human spirit is that it does not stay broken.

We mend. We heal. We say goodbye to the death of this season knowing that different life will bloom the next spring. We grieve what we expected but did not receive. We take our grief and we lay her down in the grave, and we cover what we lost with flowers and dirt and prayers and songs, knowing that somehow, some way, in some realm of our lives, rebirth will happen, again, and again, and again.