My new favorite author, Barbra McCune, is, as yet, unpublished. I’ve run across her at the monthly Open Mic Night at the Transylvania County Arts Council several times now. Her current work-in-progress, a memoir about her decade as a medical missionary in Honduras, is captivating. Those of you who follow my blog will recall that Barbra’s work was the inspiration in February for my essay “Enough is a Decision.” I can’t wait for Barbra to publish her memoir. I’ll be first in line to purchase it.
Two weeks ago at April’s Open Mic Night, I read my essay “The In-Between’ – speaking of my life after becoming a widow, but before the next part of my life would begin. After all the other writers read for their allotted four minutes, and the evening concluded, Barbra motioned to me. “When I was entering my 4th year of medical school my husband was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He died.” She told me my essay had reminded her of what she had written after she and her husband received that terrible news. I asked Barbra if she would share the writing with me, and she agreed.
As with all of Barbra’s work that I have heard, her essay from so many years earlier touched a deep part of me. I think that ability to touch someone’s innermost Self may be one of Barbra’s most significant gifts among the many she has been given.
But, of all the words Barbra wrote about that sad time, there was one sentence that struck me as the most poignant, and the most relevant for me.
The grace to let go of the no longer and the courage to discover the not yet.
So much power in those words. Those words speak about a theology of life, a reality of life, a hope and expectation of life. In short, the words in that one brief sentence give me all the directions I need in order to live a full and healthy life.
How many times have we clung to what is no longer good for us? Or to something or someone who is gone from our lives? To stay trapped in the past, because it is something that feels familiar, even as we honestly know “it” is gone, or wrong, or dangerous for us to remain. We foolishly pine for a miracle, stuck.
Moving towards the unknown is scary as Hell. It is. Anyone who says otherwise must be an adrenaline junkie out for the “rush” that being terrified provides. Think about your life. Going to first grade was scary. Going away to camp for the first time was scary. That first job was scary. And those are all lightweight events that nevertheless instilled some degree of terror in us at the time. As we got older, the scary incidents often became much worse. Like life after the death of a child; life after a divorce; life after the death of a spouse to whom you were married for 38 years.
I think I’m making a lot of progress on “the grace to let go of the no longer.” My husband and I knew he was dying. We had time to prepare. His death, while sudden, was not unexpected. For me, it’s “the courage to discover the not yet” that is scary. I fight against the urge to become a recluse. I strive for the courage to discover the not yet. I know I have a lot of life left in and for me. I want to live my life in communion with others, and maybe even with a special other. Who knows? The future is yet to be discovered. It’s just that scary first step into the “not yet” that I am finding hard to take.