these two lungs
Last night, my daughter passed out. As she fell, she hit a wooden hutch and knocked hard against our slate floor. I heard the cold thud of her body hitting from the next room over, and by the time I reached her, she was mostly unconscious, sprawled out and ashen.
This has happened once before. Her blood pressure is naturally low, and she had just been sitting with her knees up and her head down, legs thrown over the arm of a chair with her femoral artery compressed.
In the half-second of hearing her hit, I knew what had probably happened. Still, there’s no easy way to discover your child fallen in a weird shape on the floor. Did her head hit the slate? Concussion? Broken bones? Underlying condition? You know the ropes.
I checked her head, arms, legs, pupils. She has some significant bruises but no breaks. She laughed that I hung a neon green sign at the top of the stairs, reminding her to walk around a while before trying to walk down.
I’m not laughing yet. Humans are just so fragile. There are so many little systems inside of us that have to work a certain way for us to function. We are not just created, we are orchestrated—and a single renegade violin can wreck the entire composition.
—-
When I couldn’t sleep last night, I stumbled into this video of a woman waking up from a lung transplant:
She had struggled with cystic fibrosis for years, and she hadn’t known a clear breath for as long as she could remember. I cried watching her first few inhales on donated lungs—her eyes wide, arms extended in rapture as she could at last suck in air without encumbrance. Pure delight.
Those lungs were someone’s everything. Yet by this gift, the fragility of another life was made new. I don’t want to Jesus Juke you. But it’s Holy Week, and I couldn’t stop the connections or the longings it awakened.
God, help me breathe.
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It’s a weird thing being home with yourself for so many days.
Because I’m an introvert, I naturally process the world internally. There’s a significant part of my soul nobody ever gets to see. I love people, and I trust a few—but still, I guard my inner self fiercely.
Going into isolation, I wouldn’t have thought the change between regular routine and the standstill life would have been spiritually riveting for someone like me. In fact, at the onset of Covid-19, I thought this solitude would be my briar patch.
Over the years, I have watched extroverted friends use friendships to process what’s going on inside them, letting a flow of open dialogue help them discover what they think and feel. This sort of release is very rare for me. More often, I go down in a hole, sort, organize, write, confess to myself and to God. When I come back out of this space, I feel more able to engage with people in a balanced and honest way.
Yet, C19 has forced the longest, strangest full stop I’ve ever experienced. A flattening shock to my system.
It’s hard to know how to talk about what I’m learning during this awful time. I entered the crisis determined to maximize it, blooming where I was planted and all that. But now that I see so many deaths mounting—now that I feel the shock waves of communal grief—no skill or insight gained compares to the larger context of raw human suffering.
“What did you do during the 1918 flu?“ Before you have lived through a pandemic, it feels nostalgic to hear stories of refuge and joy. Inside of one—especially one in which you can see and hear every horrible story—you spend a lot of time simply mourning.
Those of us who have the mental and physical space to learn are privileged. Hundreds of thousands of global citizens are dragging themselves through another day of tortured survival—sleepless, scared, coughing, weeping, holding a hot coal of live grief in their chests.
So, I don’t want to be insensitive in writing about the microcosm of one little life. And yet, today is Good Friday, an important day for confessions.
So I will say this much.
I tried to stand up too quickly in the first days of C19. Then there was crash. Blackout. Disorientation. I’m learning my own susceptibility and the weakness in systems that hang on a thread.
And I’ve started facing some things about myself I didn’t understand in my comfortable selective, strategic hiding rhythms of daily life. I’m starting to identify foreign growths that have taken root in my soul, encumbering my spiritual inhalations. Confessing them is hard. Sometimes I want affirmation and assurance instead of a medical prognosis of, “Yes, these things are killing you.” But slowly admitting them is giving me a deep desire for something new.
Strange time. Hard time. Bruised. Wobbly. Unsteady. Admission after admission. Taking slow time to see and name all the things locked in these two lungs. Whispering prayers that going down into the surgery will eventually lead to an awakening of free and jubilant breaths.
Maybe this is why mystics and prophets found benefit in long spans of time in desert settings—alone with God, and self, and the slow settling of reality into consciousness.
Photo credit thesuccess on Morguefile (crop)