Friends,
This morning I woke up and said, “I don’t look like myself.”
Maybe it’s the weight I’ve put on, maybe it’s the flakey grease of not having showered in four days. But in these hours, in the pit of August, I have begun to feel different.
I’m here to rewrite my tongue at the edge of a most difficult season, warmed by a sure fire of faith. This past Sunday, I voice-typed the above passage in my notes app while on my walk to church. Later, I pasted it into the first draft of this newsletter, which I’ve been writing since June. I was surprised to find the document already four pages long. I have no recollection writing most of these undated paragraphs in which I repeatedly claim July to have been “the hardest month of my life”.
Since April, I’ve been endlessly complaining about and poring over twenty-four medical school applications; an arduous and necessary act of labor that has brought me grief since my early college years. I had originally planned to adapt my Statement of Purpose into a newsletter. Unfortunately, by the time it was submitted, my words made me nauseous. My initial drafts on tending to body and spirit were critiqued for being “too religious”. My beloved mentor kindly suggested I take out terms such as “liberation theology” and “vocation”.
Accordingly, I twisted my natural writing into drab, easily palatable language for hasty admissions committees. The process was dissonant and uncomfortable. While sacrificing my lyrical preferences in hopes of being considered a promising future physician, I found myself overwhelmed with a fear of failure.
r/premed loves to remind me that 60% of medical school applicants don’t get in. What would it mean to be a part of this unfortunate majority?
At one point, in the middle of writing, I crawled onto my carpet and wept violently while listening to a praise and worship song I loved when I was 16. At the end of the song, I stood up, wiped away my tears and finished the essay.
Even as my body responds to the threat of defeat, God continues to provide solace in strange and palliative ways. My childhood best friend rested his hand on my shoulder when I arrived at his apartment blasting Sufjan Stevens and sobbing without explanation. My mentor secured funding to send me to my first academic research conference. I’ve continued to sit with patients at the edge of their lives, enriched by wisdom unique to a person who is actively dying.
In my incongruent writings then and now, I return to the Biblical injunction, “Do not be afraid.”
Sitting with a particular patient this past week, I recognized it was likely the final time I would see him before he died. I had visited him about a dozen times, but because he was often accompanied by his mother, our interactions were brief. This time, I felt a spiritual attunement between us, and chose to linger at his bedside. Though he lay awake and oriented, I knew his organs were failing. I took mental note of the rosary at his bedside and offered to say a prayer for his comfort and well-being. I shut my eyes and began to plead aloud, drawing on a familiar mix of grievance and reverence that has tempered my prayers this summer. I asked the angels in the patient’s room to keep him vigil in his rest and wakefulness. I prayed for forgiveness to ease his soul at a time of sacred suffering. It was a hard-hitting, evocative plea to God. It was a prayer for a dying person. Upon opening my eyes, the patient gazed at me lovingly, beaming, his absent front teeth revealing a certain gentleness I had never seen before.
“You know, that’s the first time you touched me.”
“What?”
My head bent; I didn’t get it. I hadn’t physically touched him during our visit.
His skeletal chest began to pepper into a soft chuckle. His smile grew slowly, as though he was in equal parts pain and pleasure.
“Wait, is that a joke?”
“Girl, you need to touch someone else.”
Our connectional stillness was broken with unrestrained laughter. While his voice was weak and unsteady, I laughed for the both of us, and for the joy of his life. I laughed for the absurdity of glee on the oncology floor and in rebellion of its life-sustaining machines.
“How can I pray when I have to keep laughing?” (Tamar Teresa Day)
I think he meant that this was the first time I stayed. Although I had recognized his absent teeth and constant shiver, it took a prayer informed by his terminal suffering for us to really see each other. Our laughter gave way to my tears, and he is the first patient I have let myself cry with. In the midst of his dying, there God also was, forcing our breath through regret, grief, and delight.
This summer has taught me that help is always on the way; even if help is dying.
It is interactions such as these that put my soul back in my body, that flush my hands and keep me going in the wind’s breath of morning and the humid sweat of dusk. When visiting the sick and the lonely, I am reminded of the call to give myself away. Dorothy Day says, “without faith, it is impossible to please God”. As I’ve learned more simply in the past few months, without faith, it is impossible. I am choosing to return to this newsletter to offer grace a seat at this table, to center a place for forgiveness and strength in my floundering and faltering heart.
My dearest friends, I pray you may feel so empowered to renew your commitment to your life’s calling, no matter how futile or scary or impossible it may feel. There will never be hands like yours again. May we be convicted in the resilience of our human touch, and in a subversive attack against fear, settle in fortitude and faith.
It is the joy of my life to be writing in truth, to you, once again.
Warmly,
Abby