Live Your Life and Live it Joyfully

Hi, there. Courtney here.

I’m pissed off.

Shall we take a deep breath together? Yes! Yes we shall.

Despite my concerns that I am turning into that dreaded “angry woman” that the world seems all so concerned about holding at bay, I must admit…that feels really good to say.

Its been two years since I was last able to write in this space. There are many interconnected reasons for that and they can all be summed up in the word “pandemic.” So much has happened, and NOT happened, in the two years since I last wrote here. I am grateful for some of it…I’ve learned alot. But if I am honest, I have spent most of the pandemic with a low grade simmer of anger in my soul over HOW all the people have reacted to this tragic, tragic time. I feel self righteous saying that. Its not as though I have handled each of these days with honor and courage. But there’s one thing I’ve just not been able to let go of in this entire season of death and peril. I’ve never been able to let go of the inkling that we could endure a difficult time with laughter and joy and hope for the future. Something in my soul just will not let this go. I believe we can live well in tragic times and I am pissed off that everywhere I turn we’ve succumbed to a spirit of doom and despair. I do not understand why the people I am most intertwined with, people of Faith, refuse to live lives of joy in the midst of all this difficulty. What other options do we have? Walking around in circles like children who “want to go on making mud pies in a slum because [they] cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea?” (C.S. Lewis, we thank you for your words)

Sometimes I wonder if I am just refusing to grieve. This is possible. I am trying to remember what it looks like to grieve well. In college it looked like a lot of time alone and a lot of decisions that didn’t make sense to others but that made a hell of a lot of sense to my inner being. I took really long drives in the best car that was ever made for a college student – my Dad’s handed down navy blue Isuzu Rodeo. I quit the rowing team. I rode a bicycle across the United States one summer, ocean to ocean. I spent a lot of time with a cute guy I’d met who was more bookish than anyone I had ever dated but somehow kept wiggling his way around the circles I spent my time with. I swear I looked at him the other day and thought: “we have two children together!” like this was the first time since that second kiddo came around that I’d actually noticed how things have changed.

Grieving won’t look like it did my junior and senior year of college, this time around. I can’t buy a $400 bicycle and take off for two and a half months like I did back then. But there can be similarities. I can follow my gut and do one small thing that feels right, and just for me, on a given day. I can carve out space with friends and that cute guy and we can walk the grieving road together. Back in college I remember attending (or not attending) parties because I felt like I was the only one in pain. This time will be different as now we’ve all experienced loss and we’re all trying to feel our way back to a stable center. We can grieve collectively. I have faith that will be really beautiful.

For now, I can’t stop thinking about a moment that happened in the late night hours of October 5, 2019, the day my mom passed away. It was about 8:00 and Andy and I had just walked in the door to my Dad and step mom’s place after a long day of saying goodbye at the hospital and gathering with family who’d driven south to support my sister and I when we asked the doctors to turn off the machines. I hugged my Dad and after sitting shell shocked for a time I asked him if I could take a bath in the giant tub in his master bathroom. The one with the jets that overlooks the lake in their backyard. “Of course” he said. “I’ll go up and get it going for you.”

I met him upstairs with my towel and shampoo with the tub half full of water. “I can’t seem to get the jets to work for some reason, Court.” He told me, apologetic. “I’ll have to figure that out later but at least you can have a warm soak. Take as much time as you need.” And with that he left the room and I hopped into the warm bubbly water, quickly drowning my body head to toe in water as it filled the tub. I’d come up for air and then soak back down again as I reviewed the shockingly final six weeks of mom’s life. Six weeks that changed so dramatically and so quickly I never could have imagined it unless it had really happened. I reviewed our collective response, my sister’s and mine, and I wondered if we did it well. Was there anything I could have done differently? Did I fly up at the right time? Should I have listened to the doctor after they put her on the ventilator and promised Mom I’d return? Did she know I was planning to come back for her? I had told her this…but did she know it? Could she hear the transitions of visitors we’d arranged who came to be with her while she slept and Kristin and I figured out how to manage our households from a distance before the next trip to the hospital?

These were the questions that I drowned up and down in that tub on the night she died until the most curious thing happened, 10 minutes in.

The bathtub jets started working. In an unexpected instant, everything around me roared to life. The bubble bath soap that dad put in before I got there met the power of the bath tub jets and within minutes I was sitting in a tub overflowing with bubbles around my face and arms and legs. Within a minute, after I got my bearings, I started laughing and couldn’t stop.

This is totally something my mother would have done to knock me out of a funk. I can still hear her telling me to leave my college dorm room and go out to the bar with my friends. She was the person who told me every summer vacation to stop reading books about injustice on death row in America and to pick up a “trashy romance novel, for God’s sake.” Mom was never one to sit around and sulk. Quite the opposite she had a literal pep in her step most days that the people who knew her were quite familiar with.

And so I feel like I had my marching orders, straight from Mom that night. “Do not sulk. Live. Live your life and live it joyfully. I’ll see you soon enough.”

If she were with me today I want to believe that she’d tell me to grieve but to grieve creatively. Go for a walk. Paint a room. Quit doing something you hate. Make a new friend. Cook something delicious with an old one. Write.

“Stop reading books about injustice on death row.”

Not because injustice on death row is not important but because it is a reality. Just like pandemics are a reality. And we should engage with these realities not to feed the little devils in our hearts that tell us to live in despair over our inability to affect change in such massive spaces but to inform how we should play our part in righting the wrongs.

Which brings me back to my initial point dear readers. I am pissed. Really, really pissed. Not because we’ve lived through a pandemic. Not because my parent passed away. I am pissed because we’ve all been content to sit around the slums that these experiences have created around us and have forgotten that we are called to a holiday at sea. I keep thinking that if I can see this on the day that a parent passes away than can’t we all can see this?

And so today, that’s my question…Can you?