A Thousand Tiny Deaths

Written two years ago (Autumn of 2019), with some recent edits.

Stooping over the stovetop, I was cooking dinner and lost in my own ambling thoughts. There was a picture pinned to the side of the fridge, drawn by my curious, creative, imaginative 5-year old. In a moment of sacred wonder and clarity it caught my eye and I saw it with fresh eyes. His dimpled hands had scrawled an abstract depiction of our family, with lop-sided circles for heads and haphazardly placed stick arms and legs. Looming above our heads he had scribbled a turbulent sky with ominous, dark clouds, pregnant to bursting. Uncontainable raindrops were flooding down upon us. Maybe he drew this because we live in the Pacific Northwest, so my child knows the rain more than he knows the sun. Or maybe his little hands were sketching something much deeper that he felt but couldn’t express onto that crinkled, sky-blue construction paper.

I fought to suck in breath as the grease crackled and my misty eyes took in our family, weathering that tempest. It had been a year and a half since the diagnosis and surgeries that had changed our lives. We were all still recovering and getting used to the reality that life with our son would never truly be normal for us, and more devastatingly for him. We had also just suffered the loss of my beloved grandmother, the matriarch of our family. Lately there had been many days that felt just like this picture, like we were simply struggling to stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, and hold each other up under the heavy rainfall.

My son called to me for what must have been the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes. I succumbed to a pause in the meal preparation to join him on the couch. In this rare moment of calm he was tracing my face with those squishy boy hands, cupping my cheeks. His pupils, large like mine, constantly take in the world, suck at the light, and try to find meaning in everything. I could drown in those inquisitive, blue pools. I was whispering sweet, loving words over him calling him my “firstborn son,” telling him the joy of how he made me a mother. His eyebrows furrowed and I could tell he was working something out as he said these tentative words: “Theia’s lucky…she gets to live longer.” Never mind that his logic was flawed, that there was no way he could know the trajectory of his life. In that moment, he had worked out that he had less years to reach 100 (the magic year of death) than his younger sister. And therefore, according to five year old reasoning, “she gets to live longer.”

We are so alike, he and I, though it’s hard for me to see it sometimes, behind his daddy’s bubbling energy and charming smile. But his eyes are mine, and you can follow them down into a deep soul with a yearning desire to see and understand. I recall cycling on the same thoughts at his age and my adult brain still cannot help but tread the waters of vast unknowing.

Naturally, we had been talking about death and pain a lot that year, trying to make sense of a cruel world that is not always fair. And so we began again, as we peered out our front window at the autumn world slowly transforming into winter. We talked about it all. About how a seed buried within decomposing soil must literally break open and shatter itself in order that the smallest speck of green life can stretch its way to the surface. The tree across the street was sagging beneath the weight of golden apples unpicked and this tree came from the surrendered fracturing of one minuscule seed. The branches of that tree, had formed buds and these too had ruptured to produce the flower that then withered to create the fruit. The fruit uneaten by humans, birds, deer, and other animals would eventually fall and decay into dirt. The leaves all around were fading from green to yellow, orange, red, purple, and lastly a lifeless brown as they began their burial dance; a swirling descent. They were passing in radiant and dazzling beauty. Then they too would become one with the ground through a barren winter, to produce abundant life in the spring. And such is the nature of our world.

Death is not only a part of life; it is the fertile soil from which the fullest life is brought forth.

And then I tenderly whispered words that I knew he could not fully comprehend. I told him of the thousand tiny deaths we must die in our lifetime. Of all of the cracking and bursting open that takes place in each and every season. I knew he was feeling this reality, as I traced the scar on his spine, once red and raw now turning thin and white like a silken string. And as we looked out the window, I remembered.

I remembered the “me” that died when I first packed a suitcase to see the world outside of my own. And the many times I have done it since then.

I remembered the “me” that died when my child heart only half understood the consequences that addiction could have on loved ones.

I remembered the “me” that died when I lost a friend to sudden and crippling mental illness just days before my sixteenth birthday.

I remembered the “me” that died when I first promised my forever to live beside another beautiful and broken human. When that marriage brought me constant realizations of the shadows and ugliness within my own heart. I had to choose to change, to grow each and every day.

I remembered the “me” that died while repeatedly removing blood stained scrubs, zipping body bags, crying on the floor of my shower, and huddling in a leather chair in a therapist’s office. When my job as an ER nurse caused me to break down everything I thought I knew as I witnessed trauma after trauma. 

I remembered the “me” that died at the births of each of my children. And the “me” that has had to die in selfless sacrifice every day since then.

And I don’t miss her, the “me” that has died over and over again in each season. Sure, there are some things I wish I could unsee, un-live. Some things I wish had never happened. But I do not miss her, I do not wish to be her again. Sometimes I grieve the loss of her innocence, for all she didn’t know. She did the best with what she knew. And I’m learning to see her as beautiful too, in her own way. But she has grown through each and every day that I wish had never happened. Through every tiny death that became rich soil for new life to emerge.

We continued to gaze out the window, this boy in my lap, one of the instruments of my continued death, and yet paradoxically the bringer of so much of my fulfilled life. I told him of how we too must be laid to rest in the dirt someday, and I said the words my heart needed to hear, “but it’s not the end.” I repeated it again, reassuring myself. I explained to him how creation echoes this truth, that ultimately our deaths, each and every one, herald the beginning of new life.

The timer was ringing, and I reluctantly returned to the stovetop. Again I glanced at the drawing on the fridge, and then I saw it and in an instant it tore the breath from my chest. Off in the corner, so small it could have been missed, was a miniature sun. Above the clouds, nearly invisible, but it was there. We were swaying together under the deluge, yet above it all, the sun was still persistently burning in brilliance. And I knew in that moment, that the clouds may obscure, but they cannot actually alter the brightness of the sun. It is only our position, our perspective that can effect what our eyes behold.

Inevitably, one day the clouds will split open and we will not be able to take in the brightness of it all. And I am sure it will seem as though we never actually knew the sunlight until we had withstood the bleakest of storms. I hear this quote from Rumi ringing in my ears, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” And I will cling to this perplexing truth, that life is somehow experienced more deeply, with a thousand tiny deaths.