Small mercies, Lingering ills

Why life cannot be any different.

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There is a hum in the house that no appliance makes. It is the sound before the world stirs, a sonorous prelude. It begins before the birds remember to sing, before the kettle heats. It is the hush of breath held just beneath wakefulness, the stillness that precedes her last turn in bed, the pressure in joints not yet moved. There are no lamentations nor sirens. Just the soft, uninterrupted presence of a life lived with discomfort and disrepair. It is not clear who this pain belongs to, whether it’s mine or hers, it just seeps outwards becoming everyone’s sorrow.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…

I don’t say it out loud anymore. The prayer lives between my molars and unshed tears. I’ve learned serenity is not a burst of peace but a thin, trembling thread that Atropos could cut. This measly offering is just enough to hold things together on a good day. Some mornings, watching her stir weak tea or peel an orange slowly, as if the fruit might vanish if she rushed, it becomes clear; the hurt isn’t going away. And neither are we.

Courage to change the things I can…

So I act. There are moments when my resolve falters; on days when the cough comes back, sudden and all too unwanted, like an unpaid debt. Or when her body aches in strange inarticulate ways; knots of fatigue and unfamiliar pains blooming in unexpected places, places she couldn’t even attempt to reach. I make beds more often than necessary, google supplements even when I decry foul tastes and numerous concoctions. There’s a hunger to do something. Anything.

and wisdom to know the difference…

Somewhere along this life, I learned that grief does not always need a death. There are losses that occur in inches, not events. The person before the illness is a mere phantasm. And hope too is a despondent companion. It flickers where it shouldn’t, daring to ask for things that only make sense to an inebriated mind.

She once remarked. ‘‘I know it won’t get better, but I like pretending I don’t know.’’ And so I pretend too. We both nod at the elephant in the room, then offer it tea. It is easier to host grief than to banish it.

We laugh sometimes, often at day’s end, with music playing. Searows’ voice curls like smoke from the speakers, lyrics soft enough to bandage ancient wounds. ‘I can't heal what I hold on to.’¹ Silence makes what I am unable to let go of warmer. Music is a bridge, a release.

Some nights, I imagine a different world, one where I never learned to distinguish between the better days and not-so bad ones. Where health was not imagined and breath was not measured. Where I could be Scheherazade.

Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time…

These lines are practiced. They do not come naturally. I try anyway. When the light pools across the living room floor and she smiles just enough to make me forget the morning’s pain, I try to stay there. In that moment. And for a time, I am no longer fearful of what the next day or month holds.

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace…

This one still guts me. It is hard accepting that there is no ending more resolute than continuity. Peace might come in the form of survival and illness can be endured without being overcome.

Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it…

She peels another orange, her hands slower than before. The sun spills across the table. We talk about nothing. It is enough. It has to be. I used to demand more, from her, from myself. I would resentfully froth up the phrase in my heart’s hurt that; ‘If there must be a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness.’² and let bloody anger course through my veins. Now I practice stillness. I breathe through the maladies of the soul. A life adjusted, redefined, pared down.

Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will,

That I may be reasonably happy in this life

And supremely happy with Him forever in the next.

I no longer ask why life cannot be different. It isn’t useful. The question folds in on itself like old paper. What I ask now is: how can I be here, with her, in this exact version of the world, and be sated?

This is not a tragedy. It is not heroic. It is not even unusual. It is a life like many others, anchored on the everyday, moored in routine, glued by emotions, in the refusal to collapse. It is watching the same body carry on, tenderly, despite it all.

There is still love here. Thick and slow and unspectacular. There is faith, though where it lies in the day to day, I do not know. And perhaps that, too, is a kind of peace. The serenity of knowing things might not get worse even if they will never get better. The courage to stay. The wisdom to stop asking for anything else.

Here, in the now, she is what she is.

And somehow, this will have to be enough.

P.S. If this post hit the spot, like, comment and share with a friend who has a friend. And as always, dear readers, keep safe and stay golden.

Till the next one,

Christine.

1. Funny by Searows.

2. A phrase carved into a concentration camp cell by a Jewish Prisoner.